Westmeath Poems

Three Westmeath poems taken from The Geography of Feeling by Jimmy O’Connell, available in Just Books, Mullingar.

Daddy and Daughter Cycling

(Written during ‘lockdown’, celebrating the special bond between father and daughter.)

There are no cars parked outside Nanny Quinn’s,

the barges lie silent in the cooling summer,

as Royal Canal water, seeped in the clays of peat

and prickly gorse, glides iridescent in cloud-

tufted sunshine. Our lone heron stately sentinels

among companionable moorhen and the swift

swerve of blue gloss-tinted swallows.

The Waterway’s towpath has been re-laid,

and where once horses dragged barges through

Abbeyshrule and returned commercially laden

to the Dublin docks, now in the new logistics

and imposed contingencies of lockdown

and social distancing, I take my routine canal walk.

Old dusted down Raleigh bikes and children

wearing safety helmets gather; a father cycles by

in shorts and summer shirt, his daughter on the

carrier seat, familiar now to his tack and turn, sitting

in the safe swerve and glide of her pre-bridal dance.

A Café in Mullingar

(A meditation on the link between art and life. In Rembrandt’s painting, 'Christ on a Cross', the image of Christ is said to be a self-portrait of Rembrandt himself. The Café is Esquires, Harbour Place, Mullingar)

Howard Jones’ ‘No one is to blame’

pipes through a café in Mullingar

in the beat and thrust of electronified

syncopation. Am I the only one here

stopping for coffee and a blueberry muffin,

reflecting on Rembrandt’s painting

of a sun-deprived, grey-jaundiced

Jesus nailed to a pitch-singed cross

of cheap carpentered wood? Where within

the frame of shrouded silence he realises

his own abandonment, his fear-paralysed

eyes and gnarled screaming mouth tasting

the anguish of hope lost; this same cry

unheard in the agonised etching in an earlier

self-portrait wherein we too become

the Dutchman who has surely painted

the symbol of man as artist forsaken

between speech and dumbness, between

a God absent and the brittle belief in a

rolled-back stone and an empty tomb.

His Christ hangs bereft at our casual forgetfulness,

our walled-out emptiness now brimmed

with desires unfulfilled, and spent treasure

wasting. Is he with us now watching out

for Summer Sales and supermarket trolleys,

this café filling with shoppers and wandered-souls,

heedless of piped music in relentless loop?

Church Island

(Imagines a pre-Christian time when the first people came to settle around Lough Owel)

As the ice receded leaving fresh water

to fill the fissures of earth, it was maybe

in the time of the Fir Bolg or the Tuatha

De Danann, they came upon the lake

and felt the island as that sacred place

to which their god had led them.

And their priest and chief stood by its shore

and watched as the sun set in its silent-lit

prayer to the goddess that dwelt there,

she who had waited for them

as bride to their wandering god.

And, on a lunar appointed moment,

the priest crossed and carried with him

the lit torch of an oak branch and planted it

into the menstrual soil and out of it

were born the oracles and laws of the tribe,

and her fresh waters bore trout and fed the land,

fructifying its people. And there then came

a time when belief in local gods

was ridiculed and they recluded

to pre-Cambrian silence, but they hover

still above the lake and the stilled

sleeping goddess awaits those who know

that lake gods are of the one God

that hovered above the waters

where Genesis begins.

Jimmy O’Connell is a member of Inklings Writing Group, who meet on Tuesdays at 10.50am in the Annebrook House Hotel.