Tags
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.
