Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, FAR FROM THE LAND, by JAMES MONAHAN


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

FAR FROM THE LAND, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Kippure' we heard him matter. He was dying
Last Line: To his mountain or his heaven. So he died.
Subject(s): Death; Dublin, Ireland; Memory; Travel; Dead, The; Journeys; Trips


"KIPPURE" we heard him mutter. He was dying
in rain and a Roman winter from a shell
fetched over Alps and Apennines to shatter
the parapet by his one, trivial head.
And he was delirious now— but is there not
sometimes a deeper drum beneath the senseless
rattle of dying mouths? Or so we thought,
who heard that unEnglish name — a place or human,
we were not Irishmen and could not tell.
We only knew it for its separate meaning,
an arm flung high above the twisting foam
of this ultimate fever, then submerged again.
And what could we do? We shrugged, we changed field-dressings,
wet with the ugliest gushes of his blood.
What could we do but keep our own heads down
and hope for the end?
And then again — "Kippure" —
again he said it. This time the dams were broken.
This time the deep springs welled and overflowed.

Ah! these Italian mountains are much grander
and much more high. They do not really climb,
who top Kippure; the mountaineering men
don't call it mountain, only a high bogland,
old so the old, black peat is new with heather,
dry so the death has wasted in its fangs,
like some great serpent in senility —
and now that shivering moss has no dark fingers
to cling and to suffocate, but only pillows
the luxurious footfall of a wanderer.
I do not know when turf-bricks from my mountain
last lay on a Wicklow fire, but once they did;
for I have seen — long, rough with a heather-fringe —
those regular ramparts where the peat was taken,
those gentle trenches of antiquarian wars —
just so they innocently seemed; and relics
of peat-stacks too, unclaimed, abandoned, neat
and like Druidic trophies half dissolved
into the body of the sleeping hill. ...

Past these I climb, past these — and how that breeze
ran like a leprechaun about me climbing,
along its buffeted trail a whisk of reeds,
the small bog cotton in a fragile panic,
frantic, protesting, and the stiff-backed clover
bowed to the frolic of its scampering whim.
So half around the hill the imp went chasing,
so vanished — gone to some other place to tease;
and here was no more wind; and the flurry ended. ...

Six feet of jaggedly assembled boulders,
soon in a frame of heather I shall find
this monument, this Irish, flattering cairn,
claiming to mark the summit. But the summit
is not quite there and has no mark at all —
no mark save for the deepening sky and Ireland's
carpet unimaginably thrown
open for the homage of my eyes,
and here, ah! here is my centre. ...
Once, at school,
they said the shape of Ireland was a saucer,
flat in the middle, rimmed with her green hills —
and here am I, a watcher on the rim,
proving their simile, looking far, so far
over the Liffey and the Dublin haze
to Mullingar, maybe, and where Athlone
stands in the saucer like a cup of tea.
Thus far my teachers — but they could not teach
that Wicklow blue is subtle and profound
and unpredictable as the laugh of a child;
and showers have brushed it, moistly shimmering
with myriad hinted colours — should a rainbow
break like a miracle across that sky
it would not seem so strange, just that a hand
had gathered all those hints, had tied together
those many flowers from the absorbing blue.
And there's no way to teach that a Wicklow song
curves like the mountain road through Glenmacnass,
below it the waterfall, the gradual torrent,
the music underneath the singer's line,
and these in one harmony, together falling
to Glendalough, where Sunday people go. ...

But look to the moor, to the long, unperilous, green,
illimitable ocean of my moor,
to slim Douce, tall among those clustering waves,
and taller, further, mistier, Lugnaquilla,
the unrelenting, overlording all.
And all as an adventurer's chart might be,
patterned with speculative tracks — with one
most casual track among them, least forgotten,
meandering up to meet that easy spur.
Suddenly — see — that hill stands sheer against it,
flames like a sentinel, lunges out to fling
this trespasser down headlong to Lough Dan;
yet with desperate finger-tips it holds and, circling
this venomous instant of the mountains' will,
stretches beyond to smooth security.
How sinister that corner seemed on the day
that I remember, how like a sudden snarl,
and Lough Dan under us like Acheron,
how pitiless and dark and deep and still. ...

But another lake, another shadow, lies
under the ancient smiling of Kippure,
at the heart of my own hill a sombre menace,
quiet as treachery, vigilant, unseen.
Unseen — the whole, slow curve is nowhere broken,
no gap, no roughness visible, only the heather
and brown peat-splashes in their symmetry
from this wide summit to meadowed plains. Imagine
an excavation as by giants driven
down stark, precipitous walls, and centuries
of black bog water on those glistening sides,
endless and slithery, until a dank lake grew
beneath the derelict shaft — no earth upturned,
no stone or any sign at that shaft-head
to show how the Titans laboured. I have stumbled,
unwarned, upon this wound in the tranquil mountain
and have been afraid. It seemed a sepulchre,
unclean with the bones of immemorial time,
pungent of death.

There the coherence broke. That final fever
rose like a tide again, enveloped him.
And only small wreckage floated: name of a girl,
an indolent breeze as they lay, and a rivulet;
then a boy, barefooted, running in the bog,
shouting in ecstasy. Then sudden silence.
He raised himself, sat straight and staring westward
to his mountain or his heaven. So he died.





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