To commemorate the Official State Visit to Australia 2017 by Michael D. Higgins, President of Ireland, we are deeply honoured and grateful to reproduce the following poem, written by President Higgins, with his kind permission:
By Michael D. Higgins, President of Ireland
She knew that there was thunder
in the air
from the sulphur
she had come to know.
All day she had waited
for a visitor
to read the letter
from her daughter,
the nun,
who had written
earlier that week
from Africa.
Moving her hand along the handle
of her stick,
she sighs at all the stories
she has ready
of the older people
who had gone before her,
farmed these stony acres.
She talked too much,
she thought,
in recent times,
and then it all came clear
in silence.
She would go to the barn.
She loved it there,
where all seemed warm
and intimate too.
Taking her stick,
she stumbles
out the door
and pushes through the yard,
undisturbed
by green pools
of urine
and dung,
damp under her feet.
And it is the dryness
of the barn,
its thousand smells,
a shrine
that welcomes her.
In recent years, she’d come to know
a strange fire that sparks
from the embers
not lit from desire
but intimacies
stored
from days and nights
spent here
in better times
and all the laughter that filled this place.
Leaning towards the bin,
the smell of meal moulded
stirs the memory,
and pictures come
of hens and cheerful chatter,
the stickiness of new-born calves,
gelatin-heeled,
unsteady,
needing the pull of both hands
to stand,
wobbling,
waiting for the rack lick
of a cow’s tongue
that was, with laughter,
invoked
to describe the quiff
of her first son’s hair.
The colours of all the feathers
in a hundred nests
warm her heart,
which fills
as she tries to feel
the rounded shapes
finger-poked for eggs
in the bride years of her marriage.
Slowly rising, the warmth
moves from her fingers
through her body,
shapeless from the birth
of seven children.
Exploding through her head,
the thousand pieces,
gathered
in sense memory,
overwhelm.
She falls towards the crib
where the wood,
polished
by the neck of an itchy cow,
is marble smooth and warm
but offers no grip.
Lying tumbled in the rank hay,
she laughs
and still the colours come
of gold and amber,
of green gone brown.
She had it all.
The limber shoot
was browned by a season
that ran its course.
That rich gold head of grain
would break the stalk
in times of storm
or broken weather;
but, more often,
the stooking and the binding
intervened
between the time of fields
and the predictable
breaking
of the threshing.
She was an old sheaf
cut loose from binding,
all seed taken,
only the dried stalks
ready for the bedding
of all the life
that heated with their breath
this barn.
They found her
pitched forward
among the hay
and screamed
when they saw the youth
of the smile
that covered all her face.
Her stick abandoned,
she held in each hand
straw and feathers.
They would have to clean her up
for the laying-out.
They did not speak
to each other
or the neighbours
of where they found her
and, at the laying-out,
a holy woman
claimed
she heard a crowd
of angels
come to bring her up,
inevitably,
to Heaven.
It was not angels that sang her home
but cows and calves
and ducks and hens,
and they gave her colours
for her head,
and voices too,
and smiles and smells,
and the touch of love.
Not long after,
they decided
that it was better
to knock the barn.
It was upsetting,
particularly
to the holy woman
who said
it held memories
that disturbed her
of that day
when Mary Doyle
went out to the barn
to die.
First published in “The Season of Fire, Poems by Michael D. Higgins” (Brandon Book Publishers, 1993). Our sincere thanks to the two most reliable people in the Northern Hemisphere, Elizabeth Garvey and Christine Cullen at UCD Library, University College Dublin for their invaluable assistance in tracking down an original copy of this poem. If anyone would like to invite them for tea, they would be delighted.
Artwork by Jackie Benney. Published with permission of the artist.
