I nearly miss it in a sudden rush to get things done.
The quiet low light and deep peace of early December that is Advent in the Christian calendar and my favourite time of year. The rush is less about truly preparing for
the festivities ahead than about panicking that I may not do so in time. Then I
reassure myself: that my Christmas preparations have usually been last minute;
if I’m going to panic it might as well be at the last moment - having first
allowed myself to feast on quietude, low light and forthcoming solstice images
of the sunlight entering the passage tomb at Newgrange.See http://www.newgrange.com/winter_solstice.htm
It is not a recipe for a well-prepared Christmas time and the conflict is familiar at all times of year.
Christmas reminds me of the
inspiring Child in the manger of my childhood and the gathering of gifts, going
to church and to grandparents on Christmas day and to the other side of the family the Sunday
before. Then there was the total magic of first visiting Dublin’s Olympia theatre
and seeing sparkling ballet dancers in the pantomime on Boxing Day - more regularly
known in Ireland as St. Stevens’ Day. The conflict in my Irish identity begins
early. I find the material rush and hype from mid-November antithetical to
everything Christmas once meant to me.
I’m a natural contrarian.
I’ve only to know I must do something to be equally sure there are a thousand reasons not to and while I like to dream of creating something wonderful, involving myself in the necessary actions to bring it about is altogether another matter. It’s not helped by wanting to attend: to listen and connect - rather than get on with managing, doing and administrating.
One year I began my December alone in a cottage beside the sea and bare trees reading Harry Potter.
That was a magical time. The sojourn informed
an early poem written in response to a brief piece by the poet Paul Durcan that
appeared in The Irish Times Magazine one Christmas. Despite it being a poem susceptible to evoking cringes, I enclosed it in a letter of appreciation I
wrote to him and he was good enough to reply with a Christmas card wishing me a
flurry of snow that did indeed appear on the big Day. A few years later I made
it to having a permanent home across the field from that magical small house.
A Woman’s
Prayer for New Year
After Paul Durcan
Waiting for the tides to turn, I am held by the soft
touch of trees and blessed by holy water from the well in a fairy wood. I dance
on the shoreline and swim in the deep.
In silent prayer I wait for a compatible man who can
bear the pain of touch. He will be a man of prayer and consideration who loves
to have fun.
My laugher and shouts of joy at the sparkling stars
and the morning sun on the rising tide will rouse him. He will not be afraid to
hold my hand as, with listening and full hearts, we entrust ourselves to the
ocean.
He will see the way at times when waves submerge me,
carry turf when I’m weary of the burden of understanding. Sometimes he’ll
proffer soothing touch and defer solutions and I will revel in the warmth of
his shining light and be saved by the clarity of its beam touching land across
water.
He will stay awhile before returning to his cave, more
of a home now he’s free to come and go and I will savour solitude the more for
knowing
he will return.
2016 has been all about taking my leave of that home on the shores of Galway Bay that verges on the Burren.
The home that Gordon D’Arcy
says in his gorgeous new book, The Breathing Burren (Collins Press 2016), is at the end – or head of
a sleeping giant. I can’t remember which and my books are still, much
lamentedly, in storage while I further make space for them so I can’t
immediately check. But you can buy his book in most bookstores. It would make a
great gift to give – to others or youself.
The year has also been about taking my leave of so many of the artefacts of family history.
I moved into the house the year
after my mother died, my father had done so nine years earlier. It became the
repository of so much. I lived there alone yet experienced it as the family
home I formerly yearned. In my last days there it occurred to me it has been a
kind of archetypal family home fulfilling the fissures of earlier desire and
longing and having done so, leaving me free now to enjoy new terrains that
appear more suitable for the next stage of my life.
As an apprentice verse-maker the process has seen me visited by Kali
The Goddess Kali is the destroyer but also the other side of the Lord Shiva, the giver, of life
inspiring one of the longest poems I’ve attempted.
Today, published in Spontaneity
I see that the poet Aoife Reilly, both a former
fellow Skylight poet and a more recent incumbent of that first magic cottage,
has a poem Spontaneous Love published in the new edition of the online magazine
Spontaneity. There’s one of my own there too. I submitted The Line in response
to an interview with Kate Dempsey talking about her book The Space Between from
Doire Press http://www.doirepress.com/ Doire also published my poetry collections Whispering the Secrets and Fear Knot.
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