Celfypridd

….

Sitting on a chair outside our bedroom 

looking up at the mountain ridge

…

There was a time

in the first week of May

when the sun was setting

…

behind the wooded ridge

the warm air shimmered

with insects in their millions

…

the sounds of Martins and Swifts

Swallows too feeding in the dimming light

and now the light is bare

…

and everything, the hours

and the day is still…

so quiet you know it’s not right

©robcullen10062022

This is a message from the borderlands

an endless void a windswept land

it is a desert stripped bare of features.

…

So I whisper the message – If you could have heard

all that I’ve heard. If you could see all that I’ve seen
if you could have been there, far out there and if you

could have listened to peoples words, listened to those

broken hurting people and that place out there, in here,

in me, in you. The dark frontier, that secret place you know

I know, we know, we all know, but deny its existence.

…

But for me there is no choice. I cannot deny its imprint

on my mind, my memory is not blind, deaf or unfeeling.

But I wish sometimes that it might be so. Now what do I do

with these memories, the words I do not wish to store,

and hold like some mad treasure trove, archive of horrors

of mankind, of humankind the stories told and told again,

The faces change but the pain and fear, the words remain.

…

It’s unending, it’s our narrative as long as we survive

this story will evolve and grow for we are humans.

I worked amongst the desolation, fragments,

survivors, of lives that might have flowered.

And that endless unknowing of what might have been

of who would I have been if that had not been done

to me, to who I was, a child, and unsuspecting.

….

Imagine the innocence and the quiet trust.

And all that time of working to heal – denial.

A total blindness to the reality of the harm

being done to children everywhere you look.

It’s a reality, take a bus or a train, sit in a café

you will be close to someone who has survived.

And then the guaranteed denial that fact is fact

…

In the face of all that. And then that sound

of wheels within wheels grinding, the noise

of conversations and the deals in closed rooms

to keep silence, to protect the perpetrators

and prevent the door room from being opened

and the truth from being known and shared.

Forty years of denial, obstruction and frustration.

…

Our lives are brief, a mere fluttering in time.

So open the door wide and let the light in!

existence…emain…unsuspecting…fact…frustration…in!

…

From Rob Cullen’s collection “Uncertain Times” published September 2016 Octavo Press.

On the ferry,

I liked sitting

on the edge,

looking down,

through dead water*.

…

I was returning

to a place

that was

and was not

my home.

…

I had never

been away,

returning

on the ferry,

looking down.

…

The River Suirs’

waters swirling,

muddy grey,

where it meets

the sea.

…

In the morning,

waiting, waiting.

Nearer now

to the quay,

where he’d be waiting,

with the brake and horses,

a pair in hand.

…

Home again.

Looking down through dead water.

…

©robcullen06032021

*Deadwater – the mass of eddying water formed along a ship’s sides in her progress through the water

….

And so the small leaves come fluttering down

to quietly cover the place where you lie now.

…

Your disappearance expected for so long,

all the same has caught us by surprise.

…

Thoughts now occur of the absences

of our talks, of your loitering walks,

…

your love of a joke, the ease of your smile,

your anger too for a government – so cruel

…

of its rough trod way of breaking poor people,

of trying to destroy, a small community –

…

that birthed you, succoured you, raised you,

and the close-knit family from which you grew.

…

And this place left you the memories of its people

until it was time for you, in your way, to leave too.

…

And so the small leaves come fluttering down

to quietly cover the place where you lie now.

…

©robcullen22052022

…

It may have been just an accident of a kind that led me to find

a few lines, that began the search for more words of Farrell’s work.

But as hard as I searched I couldn’t find a book by him at all,

as I scanned the stacked shelves lined with lost memories,

the feint remains of times, of days, of others hands and eyes

I found a surprise, a collection of that other Thomas’s verse.

…

I carried the prize to look it over thoroughly in Bannerman’s Bar.

And as I sat and began to read the terse few lines of “The Return”,

two neatly folded cuttings fell to the floor. Thomas’s obituaries,

and the odour, gathered oldness and age wafted to me from the faded,

fragile yellowing page. And I could see the book had never been opened,

or rather had never been leafed through, pages hidden within pages.

…

It may have been the absence of those tell-tale lines on the spine,

or the lack of dog eared folds that might give away the sign of a verse,

a reader had once dwelled on, a preference of some kind, I suppose.

And while I sat there I was reminded once more of our stay at Ahakista,

in that August, and the hellish night when Farrell out alone disappeared,

and his body never found, in spite of all the searches over those days.

…

The Fastnet Race too was destroyed by that storm and as they said

in the Tin Shed pub it was the worst kind of blow to come out of nowhere.

And that strange remembrance brought another as they sometimes do

of our stay during that time with a friend in his old tumbledown cottage

overlooking Dunmanus Bay – and of the days finding fragments

of the racing boats, during our walks in the mornings gathering shore.

…

Thirty five years after Farrell’s unexplained death, a woman revealed 

the story of walking that night with her sons along the wind-blown edge.

She’d come across Farrell adrift in the towering waves of a sea in its rage,

and described the way he looked at her and drowned himself in order 

to prevent her losing her own life too, if she’d tried to rescue him

from the certainty of his grave, as she’d wanted to do. And so leave

her boys watching, alone and motherless. An old belief of those who worked

the sea prevented them from saving the drowning and so interrupt God’s calling.

…

At the supper table in Wolf’s house that night, talk would drift now and then.

In the lull’s quiet, heads would turn, listening keenly to the roar of the gale,

through the trees, and out on the hills. And now I write to let go of that feeling,

of that memory of you, of being haunted by you, and the storm that follows you.

robcullen©26062019

…

Footnote

James Gordon Farrell

Novelist.

(1935-01-25)25 January 1935 – ­11 August 1979(1979-08-11) (aged 44)

Bantry Bay, County Cork, Ireland.

…

Ronald Stuart Thomas

Poet

29 March 1913 – 25 September 2000

Pentrefelin near Criccieth.

…

Wolf Mankowitz

Script writer

7 November 1924 – 28^th May1998

County Cork.

…

the Cold War overshadowed much of my childhood

fear was latched and hooked onto everyday things

it was the Reds they said would do us harm

…

it went on through my teenage years too

that continuous threat the nuclear arsenals posed

the bombers of all sides armed, ready to go

…

submarines lurked in the oceans depths

then Cruise missiles came a late addition.

something changed something called détente

…

but the wars continued they just found a way

around that inconvenience it was simple

they stopped calling them wars

…

but now they’ve all caught amnesia

and fear is spreading everywhere

politicians can’t seem to help themselve

…

ladling fear whenever they can

it’s an all too obvious strategy

while the dismantling goes on

…

of Education, the National Health Service,

Social Care and so much more

it’s easy to spot the distraction of fear

…

while the narrow men shout watch for the reds

but meanwhile get into the Chinese bed

there is a collective amnesia at large

…

and we have real reason to be afraid of that

soon we’ll hear the justification for war

soon we’ll hear the need for boots on the ground

…

in whatever land is decided by the narrow men

and the ramping up of the war of words

to justify, bamboozle and hoodwink

…

that the actual threat is their stupidity

and we’ll be living in that fear time again.

meanwhile the rich get richer

…

and nothing has been learned

nothing has changed the narrow men

not even their history degrees.

…

©robcullen2018

Its always pleasing when the postie delivers some published work – especially when its in the good company of other poets work ….