Patrick Kavanagh – Fourteen Lines

I Knew As I Entered

We are born believing a man bears beliefs like a tree bears apples.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

On An Apple-Ripe September Morning

by Patrick Kavanagh

On an apple-ripe September morning
Through the mist-chill fields I went
With a pitch-fork on my shoulder
Less for use than for devilment.

The threshing mill was set-up, I knew,
In Cassidy’s haggard last night,
And we owed them a day at the threshing
Since last year. O it was delight

To be paying bills of laughter
And chaffy gossip in kind
With work thrown in to ballast
The fantasy-soaring mind.

As I crossed the wooden bridge I wondered
As I looked into the drain
If ever a summer morning should find me
Shovelling up eels again.

And I thought of the wasps’ nest in the bank
And how I got chased one day
Leaving the drag and the scraw-knife behind,
How I covered my face with hay.

The wet leaves of the cocksfoot
Polished my boots as I
Went round by the glistening bog-holes
Lost in unthinking joy.

I’ll be carrying bags to-day, I mused,
The best job at the mill
With plenty of time to talk of our loves
As we wait for the bags to fill.

Maybe Mary might call round…
And then I came to the haggard gate,
And I knew as I entered that I had come
Through fields that were part of no earthly estate.

American Sonnet for the Magic Apples

by Terrance Hayes

Or the one drunken half-quarter grand uncle recalling
The sound speckled apples on his fabled real daddy’s
Coastal orchard made falling multidimensionally
To the vaguely salty combination of plantation dirt
And marshland bearing the roots of this strange
Distant cousin to the plum, the Cherokee palm tree,
And West African pear, color of a bloody, dusky ruby,
Husky & almost as bulky as the lamenting lamb’s head
His daddy lopped off once & kicked at him laughing,
The uncle informed me wistfully at a reunion of family
Fleecers, fabricators, fairy tellers & makeup artists
With his cast-off awful alcohol stench burning my nostrils
As he gripped the back of my head & gazed deeply
At the speckled invisible apple or head in his hand.

Naming These Things Is The Love-Act

“I saw the danger, yet I passed along the enchanted way,
And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.”
Patrick Kavanaugh

The Hospital

by Patrick Kavanaugh

A year ago I fell in love with the functional ward
Of a chest hospital: square cubicles in a row
Plain concrete, wash basins – an art lover’s woe,
Not counting how the fellow in the next bed snored.
But nothing whatever is by love debarred,
The common and banal her heat can know.
The corridor led to a stairway and below
Was the inexhaustible adventure of a gravelled yard.

This is what love does to things: the Rialto Bridge,
The main gate that was bent by a heavy lorry,
The seat at the back of a shed that was a suntrap.
Naming these things is the love-act and its pledge;
For we must record love’s mystery without claptrap,
Snatch out of time the passionate transitory.

The Visiting Hour

By Toi Derricotte

he came in his seedy brown jacket smelling of paint. all

thumbs, a man stumbling over his own muscles, unable to

hold some part of himself and rock it, gently. she gave

up, seeing him come in the door, wanting to show him her

flat belly just an hour before, looking at her own corpse

in the mirror. she lay there reduced, neither virgin nor mother.

it had been decided. the winter was too cold in the garage.

they would live with her mother. the old bedroom was

already prepared, cleaned, the door opened. the solitary

twin bed remained; he would sleep on the porch.

she looked at him and tried to feel her way into the body

of a woman, a thing which has to be taken care of, held

safely in his arms.

she lay there, trying to hold on to what she had, knowing

she had to let it go.

Loving Through The Medium Of A Sonnet

Kavanagh

To be a poet and not know the trade,
To be a lover and repel all women;
Twin ironies by which great saints are made,
The agonising pincer-jaws of heaven.

Patrick Kavanagh

Sonnet

by Patrick Kavanagh (1904 – 1967)

You will not always be far away and pure
As a word conceived in a poet’s silver womb
You will not always be a metaphysical signature
To all the poems I write. In my bleak room
This very year by gods will you may be
A woman innocent in her first sin
Having cast off immortality.
Of the never to be born. The violin
Is not more real than the music played upon it.
They told me this – the priests – but I am tired
Of loving through the medium of a sonnet
I want by Man, not God, to be inspired
This year O creature of the dream-vague face
You’ll come and be a thing in time and space.

Peace

by Patrick Kavanagh

And sometimes I am sorry when the grass
Is growing over the stones in quiet hollows
And the cocksfoot leans across the rutted cart-pass
That I am not the voice of country fellows
Who now are standing by some headland talking
Of turnips and potatoes or young corn
Of turf banks stripped for victory.
Here Peace is still hawking
His coloured combs and scarves and beads of horn.

Upon a headland by a whinny hedge
A hare sits looking down a leaf-lapped furrow
There’s an old plough upside-down on a weedy ridge
And someone is shouldering home a saddle-harrow.
Out of that childhood country what fools climb
To fight with tyrants Love and Life and Time?

The Peasant Poet

Inniskeen Road: July Evening

by Patrick Kavanagh (1904 – 1967)

The bicycles go by in twos and threes –
There’s a dance in Billy Brennan’s barn to-night,
And there’s the half-talk code of mysteries
And the wink-and-elbow language of delight.
Half-past eight and there is not a spot
Upon a mile of road, no shadow thrown
That might turn out a man or woman, not
A footfall tapping secrecies of stone.
I have what every poet hates in spite
Of all the solemn talk of contemplation.
Oh, Alexander Selkirk knew the plight
Of being king and government and nation.
A road, a mile of kingdom, I am king
Of banks and stones and every blooming thing.

This seems a fitting sonnet on the Monday after the conclusion of the Tour de France, particularly since a Welshman prevailed in the yellow jersey at the end. But this poem does not depict a race, quite the opposite. It depicts the kind of bike ride that is made magical by repetition, by fraternity with friends, having done it so many times, that the riders become Lord and master of the road upon which they glide along.

Kavanagh and Selkirk shared more than this understanding of self determination, they were both the sons of poor cobblers. Selkirk responded to his surroundings of childhood poverty in Scotland by famously becoming a privateer and seeking his fortune on the high seas. Kavanagh took a decidedly different route, apprenticing to his father and following in his footsteps, settling into a life of rural poverty and finding a sense of peace in the simplicity it provides. Kavanagh understood both poverty and the ignorance that can be its bitter fruit, the latter much more vexing, his lack of access to a quality education a torment to his bright mind that would be a source of both inspiration and drive in his writing to witness his community honestly.

I recognize the feeling in this poem, the sense of understanding of a stretch of land and your community of friends and neighbors that you call home that goes beyond familiarity, becoming a place where the dust is part of your bones. A place where you look around down the road and can anticipate the view before you round the bend, a stretch where you can bike or walk it in complete darkness, so complete is your knowledge of its ruts and turns.

That is one of the magical aspects of rural life, the fact that change happens more slowly, the landscape seemingly timeless from one year to the next, so that by degrees you become one with its firmament. Kavanagh understood another truth of rural poverty, that no matter how lean the soil and crop from which it sprouts, a man and woman will give everything to defend it if they call it home. And that deep-seated grudges can become longstanding epic generational disputes over a simple boundary line of property when two families claim it as their own or one family has gotten the better of another under trying circumstances.

Epic

by Partrick Kavanagh

I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man’s land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting “Damn your soul!”
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel –
“Here is the march along these iron stones.”
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.

FYI – A rood is 40 square rods of land or about a quarter of an acre.