P.S. The Lovely Uselessness of Poetry

21 Monday Mar 2022

Posted by Editor in Language of Cancer, Leontia Flynn, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Rituals, Seamus Heaney, Themes of childhood

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charm, County Derry, cure, Damian Gorma, Faith, faith healer, folklore, identity, Influences, Leontia Flynn, Martin McGuinness, Memoir, Northern Ireland, power of poetry, reclaiming onesself, Recovery, Themes of childhood, Words of Wisdom, World Poetry Day, Writing

For the day that’s in it. For Ukraine.

The freedom and the lovely uselessness of poetry is its whole point.

~ Leontia Flynn

On March 21, World Poetry Day, UNESCO recognizes again the point of poetry, celebrating it as one of our most treasured forms of cultural and linguistic expression and identity.

In words, coloured with images, struck with the right meter, the power of poetry has no match. As an intimate form of expression that opens doors to others, poetry enriches the dialogue that catalyses all human progress, and is more necessary than ever in turbulent times.

— Audrey Azoulay, Director-General, on the occasion of 2022 World Poetry Day

My parents were raised in rural Derry, Seamus Heaney country, where they learned to be thrifty and resourceful, and when all else failed, to believe in the mystical powers of “folk healers,” those individuals uniquely gifted with “the cure” or “the charm” for all ailments. Often consulted before a medical doctor, the folk healer meted out charms in all forms – plasters, poultices, and potions in brown bottles. It was to such a man my father once turned after the local doctor told my mother there was nothing he could prescribe for her bout with jaundice. Dissatisfied with this from someone with formal medical training and a string of letters after his name, my father went deep into the Derry countryside to visit the man with “the charm.”

Observant and curious, da accompanied him into the fields but was of no help in discerning which wild herbs held curative powers. Thus, he watched and then he waited in a tiny kitchen as the healer wordlessly concocted the charm. With a stone, he beat juices from unidentified herbs, added two bottles of Guinness stout, poured the mixture into a C & C lemonade bottle and sent da on his way with instructions for my mother to drink every last drop. No payment. Just faith that it would work a healing magic.

As an adolescent, I was skeptical of the faith healer but not of the faith at work in the transaction. In crisis, when all else fails, we might try anything. When conventional wisdom seems foolish, and the right words elude us where do we go? Online, increasingly. I remember after being diagnosed with cancer, I spent as much time on Google tracking down every worst case scenario as I did staring down the cursor blinking on a blank Word document. A conspiracy began. Between us, the winking cursor and me, we would maybe find some words to help me adjust to this altered life. I could make no sense of it – nonsense. The words that fell from the lips of physicians and friends and people who love me, sent me scrambling into an encounter with my mortality. It began with a flurry of euphemisms about my inner fortitude punctuated by the silence that comes with fear of saying the wrong thing.

In the wee hours, I struggled daily to catch the best words to articulate my changed life, hoping to save them for a rainy day, the way we used to catch bumble bees in a jam-jar with holes poked in the lid. Cancer invaded my lexicon, and my dependable words failed me. “Staging” would no longer conjure the theater and the cheap seats in the ‘gods’ at the Grand Opera House in Belfast; “fog” now described a state of cognitive loss rather than a misty morning in a Van Morrison song or the cloud that obscures Pacific Coast Highway on a trip north in the summertime; “cure” no more the idiomatic “hair of the dog that bit you” but a confounding and elusive thing all wrapped up in a pink ribbon; “Mets” was not just the other New York baseball team but a tragic abbreviation for metastatic breast cancer from which no one survives yet of all the millions of dollars raised for breast cancer research in this country, only a small percentage is directed to metastatic breast cancer. Even “sentinel,” which had been reserved, until cancer came calling, for the cormorant perched on a post in the sleepy edges of Morro Bay – transformed, becoming instead the first node to which cancer cells are most likely to spread from a primary tumor. “Infusion” had been a thing to do to olive oil or vodka rendering it a gourmet gift, but because I had turned left instead of right upon leaving my oncologist’s office one day, I found myself on the threshold of the infusion suite, a room I didn’t know was there. Feeling as though I had intruded, I fled, but not before registering a row of faces of people who were sicker than me. In one microscopic moment, I made eye contact with a woman and wondered if perhaps she was cold because, as I turned away, I noted a quilt on her lap. I turned away.

Enter fleeing.

Lost for words and in need of a charm, I rediscovered County Down poet Damian Gorman. In cancer land, I found myself recalling the bombs, bullets, the “suspect incendiary devices” that were part of 1980s Northern Ireland as far less deadly than the “devices of detachment” my people used to distance ourselves from it –

“I’ve come to point the finger

I’m rounding on my own

The decent cagey people

I count myself among …

We are like rows of idle hands

We are like lost or mislaid plans

We’re working under cover

We’re making in our homes

Devices of detachment

As dangerous as bombs.”

On this day five years ago, the news back home was all about the death of Martin McGuinness. Friends from other places had asked me what it was like growing up in that place at that time – hoping to understand “The Troubles” and perhaps McGuinness himself. I directed them not to some digital archive that chronicles what has happened in Northern Ireland since August 1969, but to “Devices of Detachment.” And every October, when we are pummeled by pink ribbons again, it will be to this charm I turn. And when people die, and I don’t know what to say to bring any comfort to their loved ones, my condolences will come wrapped up in a Seamus Heaney poem – the right words at the right time.

When Heaney died, I remember wondering if the living poets would find the right words to convey their grief. I imagine most of them thought that only Heaney himself would be capable of composing the condolences to assuage Ireland’s collective sorrow over his passing. I could not imagine the landscape of my lovely, wounded homeland without him. He had scored my life with poems about hanging clothes on the line and ironing them, about bicycle riding and blackberry picking; about men like my da divining water and thatching roofs; about peeling potatoes at the kitchen sink when “all the others were away at Mass.” On one of her summer visits to my Phoenix home, a lifetime away from Anahorish, my mother once recalled Seamus as a young man with sandy hair, riding his bicycle around Castledawson. He would probably be pleased that her recollection of him is less as renowned Nobel Laureate and more “a son of Paddy Heaney’s.”

In an unguarded moment, when a Facebook memory arrives or I land on a page in a scrap book to see the complete and smiling family of which I once was a part, I turn again to Heaney until the remembered trauma subsides. I don’t know the moment my husband died – I know only that he was pronounced dead at 1:10PM – Arizona time – on November 15th. Around the time, I was posing for a photograph in Barney Devlin’s forge on the other side of Heaney’s Door into The Dark, holding in my hands the blacksmith’s anvil – the one that made the sweeter sound – then striking it. I still imagine a blistering shower of sparks and wonder if it was at that moment he died, alone in our Phoenix home.

It is soothing to believe – even knowing others won’t – that maybe I was within Heaney’s spiritual field for just that moment and in knowing I would return to the desert with my daughter to do what we were fit for – to “take up the strain of the long tailed pull of grief” – to move forward, to love and be loved, to do what Heaney once told a group of young graduates:

Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit. There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you . . . Make the world before you a better one by going into it with all boldness. You are up to it and you are fit for it; you deserve it and if you make your own best contribution, the world before you will become a bit more deserving of you.

A young reporter once asked me if I thought you had to be Irish to appreciate Seamus Heaney’s poetry. The way she asked it suggested she was unfamiliar with his work. I responded inadequately. What I meant to tell her was that in the crucible of Heaney’s poetry, she would no doubt find herself along with everyone else; she would find “the music of what happens” – then and now; she would find not what it means to be Irish, but all that it means to be human and searching, always searching – digging – for the goodness that’s in us and still for us. She would find the charm; she would understand what Carol Ann Duffy once explained in her response to the devastation of the Haiti earthquake as it unfolded on television:

We turn to poetry at intense moments in our lives . . . when we lose people, or are bereaved, we look for a piece of music or poem to read at the funeral, or when we fall in love we turn to poetry, or when children are born. And I think that can happen at moments of public grief too, as well as personal. It is so close to prayer, it is the most intense use of language that there is. It is the perfect art form for public or private grief.

Ukrainian-American poet, Ilya Kaminsky, writes in the New York Times, of his desperation to find ways out of Ukraine for his friends – writers, poets, and translators. Many of them do not want to leave their homes, even as Russia continues to bombard their cities:

I ask how I can help. Finally, an older friend, a lifelong journalist, writes back: “Putins come and go. If you want to help, send us some poems and essays. We are putting together a literary magazine.”

In the middle of war, he is asking for poems.

A Postscript

When we fall in love we turn to poetry . . . and on this World Poetry Day, I am in love, remembering a wintry day in County Clare, on The Flaggy Shore.

Post Script by Seamus Heaney

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown, headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And find the heart unlatched and blow it open.

The public library: a first responder for all time.

30 Thursday Sep 2021

Posted by Editor in Memoir, Northern Ireland, Themes of childhood

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Agatha Christie, Antrim Grammar School, Antrim Primary School, Clifford T. Ward, Dublin Road, Enid Blyton, Gloria Steinem, How to Open a Book, Influences, Jack Kerouac, Michael Morpurgo, mobile library, National Literacy Month 2021, Northern Ireland, Phillip Pullman, public library, Thomas Jefferson

September is National Literacy Month, an annual opportunity to draw attention to the state of literacy in the United States. In Maricopa County, Arizona, where I used to live, one in four adults cannot read these words. One in four adults cannot, therefore, cannot search the internet for news or bargains or jobs. One in four adults cannot fill out a form or sign their name on a receipt or write a message on a birthday card.

Globally, a staggering 773 million youth and adults still cannot read and write and 250 million children are failing to acquire basic literacy skills – and basic literacy skills are no longer confined to reading, writing, and basic computation. Literacy, according to UNESCO, is

a means of identification, understanding, interpretation, creation, and communication in an increasingly digital, text-mediated, information-rich and fast-changing world.

Literacy is the foundation for full participation in life, the means by which we step into the world – with confidence. Libraries can help. All over the world, there are at least 430,000 public and community libraries, one for every 16,000 people – for countries where there is available data – millions of school libraries, and many other kinds of libraries. A renewable resource – ready and waiting to help.

My first encounter with a library set me on a life-long love affair with words. Not a bricks and mortar library, the mobile library of my childhood was a bus full of magic that visited a housing estate on Antrim’s Dublin Road every week. Although a world away from the United States, I suspect it was exactly what Thomas Jefferson had in mind:

I have often thought that nothing would do more extensive good at small expense than the establishment of a small circulating library in every county, to consist of a few well-chosen books, to be lent to the people of the country under regulations as would secure their safe return in due time.

. . . the library came to me. Every Wednesday, the mobile library parked around the corner, its desultory young driver oblivious to my excitement as I climbed the steps up into the back of his van, an improbable space transformed by well-chosen books into what Jefferson may have envisioned. There, I fell in love with books. It was our Aladdin’s Cave, unexpected treasures waiting for anyone who ventured inside.

The driver, erstwhile “library man” was reminiscent of an early Dr. Who. Reminiscing with my younger brother, he does not share my opinion of the library man, finding him not at all desultory or nerdy. Rather, he found him a cool cat with wire-rimmed spectacles who could have handily passed as a member of Clifford T. Ward‘s road crew. Irrespective of our impressions or the library man’s academic qualifications, he was also just another “man” among the diverse cast of men that peopled our childhood: the coal man, the bin man, the bread man, the milk man, the Braid mineral man, the insurance man, the encyclopedia Britannica man, and the ice-cream man. The library man also brought with him a female assistant whose task was to hand out the books. Imagine the disappointment of one of my neighbors, Paul Crilly, when he reached up to her with 5 pence, expecting an ice-cream cone in return.

Unlike Mr. Softee’s van, the mobile library as an industrial-gray and did not announce its arrival in Green Park Drive with a tune. It lumbered around the corner, its sides emblazoned with scarlet letters proclaiming it property of the North Eastern Education and Library Board. My brother Keith, remembers the mobile library experience in minute detail, from its gray carpeted floor and the impossibly huge steering wheel at the front, to the doors that opened in the middle to reveal the welcoming sight of a full length of the van festooned with books neatly arrayed from floor to ceiling. At one end, there was a counter, behind which Dr. Who was stationed with the nice lady who gave out the books. As Keith describes it, “the counter spanned the width of the vehicle and could be partly opened when Dr. Who wished to venture out from the inner sanctum to assist with queries from pesky kids and pensioners.”

This area behind the counter was a veritable cockpit from which the library man ran his show. “For Office Use Only,” nobody else was allowed back there for a behind-the-scenes glimpse into his fastidious filing system. Governed entirely without computers, it relied on little cardboard boxes of index cards, the notations on which were most likely based on the Dewey Decimal system I had to memorize for Mr. Smyth some years later at Antrim Grammar School. I have since forgotten Mr. Dewey, but quite clearly remember the day Mr. Smyth taught us, with considerable flair and panache, how to open a book. Seriously. While as non-vital a lesson as how to conjugate a verb in Latin, it nonetheless still crosses my mind every time I buy a new hard-bound book.

In fairness, the library man never seemed to mind how we opened our books. He knew what we liked, and he let us order books that he would bring the next week. My mother often ordered books for us, and she would wait patiently while the library man retrieved them from a special stash behind the counter. Strange that as much as she loved to read, she never once borrowed a book for herself.

Other than my mother, I remember the occasional grown-up poring over the Agatha Christie collection or asking the library man to set aside Jaws for the following week. It was generally accepted that the mobile library belonged to us, the children of the Dublin Road. With its never-ending supply of books, we were never lonely.

In the mobile library, I discovered prolific children’s author, Enid Blyton. My best friends were her ‘famous five,’ and the girls who attended very posh boarding schools, St. Clare’s and Malory Towers. Written in the late 1940′s, Enid Blyton’s books are now regularly lambasted for reinforcing class and gender stereotypes. It’s true, all true, but those books were real page-turners that provided hours of delight and sheer escapism for a working class girl in 1970s Northern Ireland.

To this day, I cannot bring my presumably enlightened and evolved self to criticize Enid Blyton or any of the worlds she created. Every time I opened one of her books, it was to fully immerse myself in secret passageways, coastal caves that needed exploring, treasure maps, midnight feasts, and the unsavory albeit formulaic plans of ne’er-do-well adults that were, foiled, in the eleventh hour, by “the five,” armed only with torches, the batteries of which never ran out. Each of their adventures began or ended with a picnic in uncharacteristic British sunshine, and without fail, the menu included piles of ham sandwiches and chocolate eclairs, washed down with the obligatory “lashings of ginger beer.” I read these books over and over, borrowed and re-borrowed them. In my ten-year old imagination, I was the “sixth” friend. I belonged with them. I was every bit as feisty as ‘tomboy’ George, as clever as Julian, playful like Dick, and kind as Anne. And, Timmy, the dog, loved me best!

My little brother read Enid Blyton’s books too. He began with the adventures of children who ran away from home to join Mr Galliano’s Circus. He once told me that he often fantasized about hiding behind the counter and waiting for the mobile library to careen out of the Dublin Road estate, a safe distance from our house, before pouncing on the unsuspecting library man with his plans for life as “a literary stowaway on the road.” My wee brother, the Jack Kerouac of Antrim Primary School, who knew even then that this was but a delightful reverie, and that our beloved library was likely bound for a prosaic council parking lot, where it would sit behind a padlocked gate with nothing more romantic on the horizon than Artie Warwick’s petrol station, ‘wee Hughie’ O’Donnell’s pub or perhaps the laundry of the Masserene Hospital.

Along with Enid Blyton’s entire oeuvre, my brother ran away instead in the pages of all of the Asterix the Gaul books, most of the Adventures of Tin Tin, a collection of Hitchock inspired adventures, and The Three Investigators, one of whom bore the splendid name, Jupiter “Jupe” Jones. He also read The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and reached the inevitable conclusion that Nancy’s sleuthing skills were superior. He even admits to reading the entire non-boy Malory Towers series. Such was the allure of Enid Blyton.

Equal to our books from the mobile library was the impressive variety of comics delivered weekly by a lanky paper boy, Hugh “Pick” McGarry. For my brother, there was The Beano and The Dandy, the latter filled with characters whose names I still remember, Desperate Dan, Minnie the Minx, and Beryl the Peril. For the Crilly girls and me, first came The Twinkle, “the picture paper especially for little girls.” Then, there was The Bunty, notable only because – over 50 years later – I have yet to meet a real-life person named Bunty, The Judy, The Mandy, and then in our adolescence, The Diana and The Jackie. In my mind, The Jackie was a bona fide women’s magazine, complete with fashion and make-up tips, quizzes on how to “win his heart,” and the much anticipated pin-ups of pop stars of the day, usually one of the three Davids – Bowie, Essex, or Cassidy. Circa 1975, my bedroom wall featured a very young David Cassidy grinning at me, and I was doing quizzes in The Jackie to see if, by some stretch, my personality might possibly match his.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, a young Gloria Steinem, was making her mark, navigating in a way she would describe to Oprah Winfrey thirty years later:

I had learned in Toledo, growing up, how to get a man to fall in love with me. Now, this is an important survival skill and we should recognize it. It’s a survival skill because if you make much less than men, if you need marriage, society says, in order to enjoy sexuality or have a child, you learn as a survival skill, in a deep sense, how to get men to fall in love with you.

I don’t know how many women in 1971 Antrim knew about Gloria Steinem or even if her books were available to them in the mobile library, but I would wager they knew exactly what she was talking about.

The Crilly children, my brother, and I are all grown up now and far away from the Dublin Road. We have children of our own, and we live in houses where you are likely to find a high-brow book or two – literature – the likes of which we would never have sought in the mobile library. We know because somebody said so that James Joyce’s Ulysees is “better” than Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, but none of us would want to imagine an Antrim childhood bereft of the latter.

Former Children’s Laureate, Michael Morpurgo agrees and remains a staunch advocate for Enid Blyton, whose books his father banned from the household, deeming them superficial and unfavorable to his development as a reader:

But he was wrong. Her books were terrific page-turners in the way no others were. I had all sorts put into my hands when I was very little – I was offered Dickens at eight – that were not suitable for boys my age at all. But with Enid Blyton, I found I could actually get into the story, and finish it. They moved fast, almost as fast as comics, and there was satisfaction to be had on every single page. Were they great literature? Of course not. But they didn’t need to be.

No. They didn’t. Not for me, nor my brother or any of us who devoured those adventures. It was this eclectic mix of books borrowed from the mobile library, our cherished comics, and the thick volumes of Great Britannica encyclopedias that planted in us an unshakable love for the printed word, a passion for books. Behind this, were parents who cared not what we read but only that we read. They spent a small fortune on those weekly comics throughout our childhood, more volumes of The Encyclopedia Britannica and annuals every Christmas that included an updated Guinness Book of Records, and, as we grew older, the classics appeared in beautiful hard-bound leather editions.

In my late fifties now, the halcyon days of the NEELB mobile library are in my rear-view mirror. I loved it, and it loved me back, unconditionally, granting me free access to experiences and places that would otherwise have been beyond my grasp. I think it was the greatest gift my mother ever gave me – taking me to that space filled with books. I could borrow any one I wanted. “Get whatever you want, pet.” Again and again.

In the Spring of 2020, COVID-19 led to temporary closures of public library buildings and suspension of mobile libraries altogether. Librarians were forced to find new ways to support their patrons – providing online story time for children or delivering a book to someone in quarantine, or emailing a research article to a PhD student.

Libraries on both sides of the Atlantic saw demand skyrocket for e-books, bringing the digital divide into sharp focus – those hit hardest were often those living in remote rural communities, the elderly, those for whom mobility is a problem, the under-served, and under-represented. Those without access to broadband connectivity were unable to download books, and then there were all those people who have neither the access nor the means to go online to purchase a book.

Libraries became important again, shift-shaping to adapt to the needs of their customers. Although buildings and books were off limits – unless perhaps if they were transformed into vaccination sites – libraries found ways to offer online programs and curbside pickup services as well as book deliveries to people, lonely and alone at home. For people who depended on the library’s wi-fi connection or its electrical outlets to charge their phones, libraries stepped up. And, as National Literacy Month 2021 draws to a close, they are still stepping up to do many of the things that have nothing to do with books, but everything to do with that wider definition of literacy. Libraries are our first responders. They always have been.

Every community needs books, and somewhere at this very moment are children poised to discover that they are what author Philip Pullman describes as “citizens of the republic of reading. Only the public library can give them that gift.”In 2011, Pullman made an impassioned plea to defend Oxfordshire libraries. For anyone who questions the value of public libraries or the power of reading to forever change the trajectory of a child’s life, he would say this:

But what a gift to give a child, this chance to discover that you can love a book and the characters in it, you can become their friend and share their adventures in your own imagination. And the secrecy of it! The blessed privacy! No-one else can get in the way, no-one else can invade it, no-one else even knows what’s going on in that wonderful space that opens up between the reader and the book. That open democratic space full of thrills, full of excitement and fear, full of astonishment, where your own emotions and ideas are given back to you clarified, magnified, purified, valued. You’re a citizen of that great democratic space that opens up between you and the book. And the body that gave it to you is the public library. Can I possibly convey the magnitude of that gift?

poetry – the charm of it

21 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by Editor in Language of Cancer, Leontia Flynn, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Rituals, Seamus Heaney, Themes of childhood

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charm, County Derry, cure, Damian Gorma, Faith, faith healer, folklore, identity, Influences, Leontia Flynn, Memoir, Northern Ireland, power of poetry, reclaiming onesself, Recovery, Themes of childhood, Words of Wisdom, World Poetry Day, Writing

For World Poetry Day 2016.

The freedom and the lovely uselessness of poetry is its whole point.

~ Leontia Flynn

My parents were raised in rural County Derry, in Heaney country, where they learned to be thrifty and resourceful, and also – when all else failed – to believe in the mystical powers of “folk healers,” those individuals uniquely gifted with “the cure” or “the charm” for whatever ailed us. Consulted only after it was determined that they had flummoxed the medical doctor, the folk healer meted out charms in all forms – plasters, poultices, and in brown bottles. It was to such a man my father once turned after the local doctor told my mother there was nothing he could prescribe for her bout with jaundice. Dissatisfied with this from a man with formal medical training and a string of letters after his name, my father went deep into the Derry countryside to visit the man with “the charm.”

Observant and eager to help, my father accompanied him into the fields, but he was of no use at all in discerning which wild herbs held the curing powers. Thus, he watched and then waited in a tiny kitchen as the healer wordlessly concocted the charm. With a stone, he beat the juices from the herbs then mixed in two bottles of Guinness stout. He poured it into a Cantrell and Cochrane lemonade bottle and sent da on his way with instructions for my mother to drink every last drop. No payment. Just faith that it would work a healing magic.

I used to be skeptical of the faith healer but not of the faith at work in the transaction. In crisis, when all else fails, we might try anything. When conventional wisdom seems foolish, and the right words are in hiding, where can we go?

Not Google, I wish I could say, but after being diagnosed with cancer, I spent as much time on the Internet researching all the worst case scenarios as I did staring down a cursor that blinked on a blank Word document. A conspiracy began. Between us, the winking cursor and me, we would maybe find some words to help me adjust to my altered life. Everywhere else I found only no sense – nonsense. The words that fell from the lips of physicians and friends and people who love me, sent me scrambling into a frightening encounter with my mortality. It began with the fast and furious flurry of euphemisms about my inner fortitude. There was also silence, from those who were frustrated by not having the “right” words and crippled by fear of saying the wrong thing. There were friends and family who, unafraid and angry on my behalf, jumped in, took charge, and said the “wrong” thing anyway, made worse because I lacked the right words to explain why. I suppose it was around this time that I understood how Van Morrison’s “Inarticulate Speech of the Heart” speaks volumes. Thus,in protest,I began talking to myself, struggling to catch the best words to present my altered life, hoping to save them in a jam-jar with holes poked in the lid, knowing I would need them down the road.

The cancer had invaded my lexicon, and I could no longer count on my words. “Staging” would never again conjure only the theater and the cheap seats in the ‘gods’ at the Grand Opera House in Belfast; “fog” I would now attach to a state of cognitive loss rather than a misty morning in a Van Morrison song or the cloud that often obscures parts of Pacific Coast Highway as we head north in the summertime; “cure” no more the idiomatic “hair of the dog that bit you” but a confounding and elusive thing all wrapped up in a pink ribbon; “Mets” was not just the other New York baseball team but a tragic abbreviation for metastatic breast cancer from which no one survives yet of all the millions of dollars raised for breast cancer research in this country, only 2% of it is directed to metastatic breast cancer. Even “sentinel,” which had been reserved, until cancer came calling, for a lonely cormorant perched on a post in the sleepy edges of Morro Bay was transformed, now the first node to which cancer cells are most likely to spread from a primary tumor. “Infusion” was something done to olive oil to transform it into a gourmet gift, but because I had turned left instead of right upon leaving my oncologist’s office one day, I found myself on the threshold of the infusion suite, a room I didn’t even know was there. Feeling as though I had intruded, I fled. But not before I had registered a row of faces of people who were sicker than I. In one microscopic moment, I made eye contact with a woman and wondered if perhaps she was cold because, as I turned away, I noted a quilt on her lap. I turned away.

Enter fleeing.

Inarticulate and stunned by what the cancer was doing to the efficacy of words – in need of a charm – I rediscovered County Down poet Damian Gorman. Trapped in cancer land, I found myself remembering the bombs, bullets, the “suspect incendiary devices” that were part of 1980s Northern Ireland as far less deadly than the “devices of detachment” my people used to distance ourselves from it –

“I’ve come to point the finger

I’m rounding on my own

The decent cagey people

I count myself among …

We are like rows of idle hands

We are like lost or mislaid plans

We’re working under cover

We’re making in our homes

Devices of detachment

As dangerous as bombs.”

When people ask me what it was like growing up in that place at that time – hoping to understand “The Troubles” – I direct them not to some digital archive that chronicles what has happened in Northern Ireland since August 1969, but to “Devices of Detachment.” And in October, when I am pummeled by pink, it is to this charm that I turn. And when people die, and I don’t know what to say to bring any comfort to their loved ones, my condolences will come wrapped up in a Seamus Heaney poem – the right words at the right time.

When Heaney died, I remember wondering which living poet would have the right words, knowing that only Heaney himself would be capable of composing the condolences to assuage Ireland’s collective sorrow over his passing. I could not imagine the landscape of my lovely, tragic homeland without him. Heaney had scored my life with poems about hanging clothes on the line and ironing, about biycyle riding or blackberry picking and of potato-peeling at the kitchen sink with his mother when “all the others were away at Mass.” Sitting at my kitchen table, in Phoenix, Arizona, a lifetime away from Anahorish, my mother once recalled him as a young man with sandy hair, riding his bicycle around Castledawson. He would probably be pleased that her recollection of him is less as renowned Nobel Laureate and more “a son of Paddy Heaney’s.”

When I open a picture book to see the complete and smiling family of which I once was a part, I break my own heart – again – and then I turn to Heaney. I start remembering. The process confounds me. I don’t know when my husband died. I only know he was pronounced dead at 1:10PM on November 15th. Posing for a photograph with Barry Devlin at the forge on the other side of The Door into The Dark, holding in my hands the anvil that made the sweeter sound, then striking it, I imagine a shower of sparks and wonder if it was at that very moment on November 15th that Ken died, alone and in our Phoenix home.

There is something soothing – and right-seeming – in believing I was maybe within Seamus Heaney’s spiritual field for just that moment and in knowing I would return to the desert with my daughter to do what we were fit for – to “take up the strain of the long tailed pull of grief.”

I have marked that time only twice, enough for it to be considered an annual ritual in the ‘un-learning’ of November. Every year, forever, on the anniversary of his death, I know I will turn over the details and hold on to what I imagine was Ken’s last moment on earth. A friend from back home tells me this is “an Irish thing,” that this kind of thinking is sewn tidily into my DNA. Once, over a cup of tea with her, we realized we do not know when we learned these rituals, or if they were explicitly taught to us.

Somehow, we just know to mark the time of death; we know to stop our clocks and wrist-watches at that hour. We know to cover the mirrors, draw the blinds, and close the curtains. We know that we know what to do when led silently up into the room where the deceased has been “laid out”; how to pay our respects in private and in public; how to offer sympathies over china cups of tea balanced on saucers that bear digestive biscuits; when to bring plates of sandwiches cut in triangles, all manner of cakes, and tray-bakes; we know to shake hands and when the time is right to whisper or cry or even to laugh as we enjoy a bit of craic about lives lived in full.

Of the stories I tell about the days after Ken died, the one that affects me most, because it left no doubt of who I am is the one about Frank, the tall neighbor who came into my parent’s Castledawson house and waited in their living room until he could shake my hand and tell me he was very “sorry for my trouble.” A man like Big Jim Evans in Heaney’s “Mid-Term Break.” After all these years so far away, I never imagined someone would say those words to me. In retrospect, they were the only words that mattered.

A reporter once asked me if I thought you had to be Irish to appreciate Seamus Heaney’s poetry. The way she asked it suggested she was unfamiliar with his work. Still, I responded inadequately. I meant to tell her that in the crucible of Heaney’s poetry, she would no doubt find herself represented along with everyone else; she would find “the music of what happens” then and now; she would find not what it means to be Irish, but all that it means to be human and searching, always searching – digging. She would find the charm.

P.S.

Post Script by Seamus Heaney

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~ And find the heart unlatched and blow it open.

the lovely uselessness of poetry

22 Sunday Mar 2015

Posted by Editor in Language of Cancer, Leontia Flynn, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Rituals, Seamus Heaney, Themes of childhood

≈ 9 Comments

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For World Poetry Day 2015.

The freedom and the lovely uselessness of poetry is its whole point.

~ Leontia Flynn

My parents were raised in rural County Derry, Heaney country, where they learned to be thrifty and resourceful, and also – when all else failed – to believe in the mystical powers of “folk healers,” those individuals uniquely gifted with “the cure” or “the charm” for whatever ailed us. Consulted only after it was determined that they had flummoxed the medical doctor, the folk healer meted out charms in all forms – plasters, poultices, and brown bottles. It was to such a man my father once turned after the local doctor told my mother there was nothing he could prescribe for her bout with jaundice. Dissatisfied with this from a man with formal medical training and a string of letters after his name, my father went deep into the Derry countryside to visit the man with “the charm.”

Observant and eager to help, my father accompanied him into the fields but was of no use at all in discerning those wild herbs that held the curing powers. Thus, he watched and then waited in a tiny kitchen as the healer wordlessly concocted the charm. With a stone, he beat the juices from the herbs then mixed in two bottles of Guinness stout. He poured it into a Cantrell and Cochrane lemonade bottle and sent da on his way with instructions for my mother to drink every last drop. No payment. Just faith that it would work a healing magic.

The cancer invaded my lexicon, and I could no longer count on words. “Staging” would never again conjure only the theater and the cheap seats in the ‘gods’ at the Grand Opera House in Belfast; “fog” I would now attach to a state of cognitive loss rather than a misty morning in a Van Morrison song or the cloud that often obscures parts of Pacific Coast Highway as we head north in the summertime; “cure” no more the idiomatic “hair of the dog that bit you” but a confounding and elusive thing all wrapped up in a pink ribbon; “Mets” was not just the other New York baseball team but a tragic abbreviation for metastatic breast cancer from which no one survives yet of all the millions of dollars raised for breast cancer research in this country, only 2% of it is directed to metastatic breast cancer. Even “sentinel,” which had been reserved, until cancer came calling, for a lonely cormorant perched on a post in the sleepy edges of Morro Bay was transformed, now the first node to which cancer cells are most likely to spread from a primary tumor. “Infusion” was something done to olive oil to transform it into a gourmet gift, but because I had turned left instead of right upon leaving my oncologist’s office one day, I found myself on the threshold of the infusion suite, a room I didn’t even know was there. Feeling as though I had intruded, I fled. But not before I had registered a row of faces of people who were sicker than I. In one microscopic moment, I made eye contact with a woman and wondered if perhaps she was cold because, as I turned away, I noted a quilt on her lap. I turned away.

Enter fleeing.

“I’ve come to point the finger

I’m rounding on my own

The decent cagey people

I count myself among …

We are like rows of idle hands

We are like lost or mislaid plans

We’re working under cover

We’re making in our homes

Devices of detachment

As dangerous as bombs.”

When Heaney died, I remember wondering if the living poets would have the right words, thinking that only Heaney himself would be capable of composing the condolences that would assuage Ireland’s collective sorrow over his passing. I could not imagine the landscape of my my lovely, tragic homeland without him. Heaney had scored my life with poems about hanging clothes on the line and ironing, about biycyle riding or blackberry picking and of potato-peeling at the kitchen sink with his mother when “all the others were away at Mass.” Sitting at my kitchen table, in Phoenix, Arizona, a lifetime away from Anahorish, my mother once recalled him as a young man with sandy hair, riding his bicycle around Castledawson. He would probably be pleased that her recollection of him is less as renowned Nobel Laureate and more “a son of Paddy Heaney’s.”

When I open a picture book to see the complete and smiling family of which I once was a part, I break my own heart, and then I turn to Heaney. I start remembering. I don’t know when my husband died. I only know he was pronounced dead at 1:10PM on November 15th. Posing for a photograph with Barry Devlin at the forge on the other side of The Door into The Dark, holding in my hands the anvil that made the sweeter sound, then striking it, I imagine a shower of sparks and wonder if it was at that very moment that Ken died, by himself in our Phoenix home. There is something soothing – and right-seeming – in believing I was maybe within Heaney’s spiritual field for just a moment and in knowing I would return to Phoenix with my daughter to do what we were fit for – to “take up the strain of the long tailed pull of grief.”

I have marked that time once, but it will become an annual ritual as I ‘un-learn’ November. Every year, forever, on the anniversary of his death, I will turn over the details and hold on to what I imagine was Ken’s last moment on earth. A friend from back home tells me this is “an Irish thing,” that this kind of thinking is sewn tidily into my DNA. Over a cup of tea with her, we realize we have no idea when we learned these rituals, or if they were explicitly taught to us. Somehow, we know to mark the time of death; we know to stop our clocks and wrist-watches at that hour. We know to cover the mirrors, draw the blinds, and close the curtains. We know that we know what to do when led silently up into the room where the deceased has been “laid out”; how to pay our respects in private and in public; how to offer sympathies over china cups of tea balanced on saucers that bear digestive biscuits; when to bring plates of sandwiches cut in triangles, all manner of cakes, and tray-bakes; we know to shake hands and when the time is right to whisper or cry or even to laugh as we enjoy a bit of craic about lives lived in full.

P.S.

Post Script by Seamus Heaney