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Tag: Carol Ann Duffy

i don’t want to wash it off. instead, i am in that necessary liminal state of in-betweens, when a newfound knowing needs time and space and silence to seep in. when we’re wise to open wide our pores, to fill our lungs, to allow our synapses to affix to new neural pathways. to come to indelible understanding.

if that seems an odd way to describe an adventure, so be it. my days in ireland were so much more than a “trip,” a “vacation,” a “getaway”—banal descriptors for folderol and whimsy, with suitcase attached. instead, my days in dublin, cork, and county clare were something of a journey in its deepest form: a coming to know someone, some place, i’ve always known but not yet fully met. and that someone, in fact, was me. a deep-down part of me long stirring, long felt, but not yet seen in fine focus. as if untold parts of me longed to know from whence they came. and not just my affinity for cloudy days and wit and poetry. and why i feel the hand of God so profoundly in the morning’s mist, and the moonbeams’ amber glow.

or maybe it was propelled by a yearning never sated, a yearning my whole life long to know the people from whom i sprang. the grandmother whose stories have stirred me from the start. the father who spoke so little of his past, and whose answers to my questions died when he breathed his last in 1981.

maybe my search was a daughter’s reaching for the hem of her father’s cloak. to run my fingers along its nubby threads, to stitch in quilt squares where the cloth had worn too thin. maybe there is something of longed-for re-union in my diligent tracings of ancestral ties and tales. maybe my father is who i try still to reach.

and then there’s the radiant present, the crucible of time that amplifies the here and now, the intense knowing that each and every hour is a gift, and before it ends, i intend to magnify the time, to expand the boundaries of my heart, to leave tracings on the ones i love so that my imprint might not fade so quickly. so that some part of me forever lingers in the one place where it matters: their blessed hearts.

i remember, in the darkest turns of these past two years, and especially at the turning of my latest birthday, how deep the wish i made, when i closed my eyes and drew a deep, deep breath, one that filled my lung and a half. i wished with all my might for precious time with my boys, time huddled close, time punctuated with the percolations of laughter without end. time punctuated with the sort of silence that is sodden even its wordlessness, because you know each other so well, so adoringly, you’ve room for time inside the vault of your own thoughts.

my wishes, every one of them, came tumbling true in the trek we took these past eight days, returning to the homeland of my soul, my spirit, my way of being.

in that uncanny way we can reach across time, reach into a past that was not ours, i’ve long felt that tugging cord to my grandma anna mae, the kentucky schoolteacher whose papa, thadius shannon, hailed from the granite house at annagh bridge, in county clare, on the wedge of land squeezed between the confluence of the annagh and the kildimo rivers as they flow into the sea at spanish point.

to press my sole onto that soil, to walk the land and listen to the rush of water playing over rocks, to do so with my boys at my side, and my God shining down and through me, was to feel bathed and baptized in life as sweet as it allows.

it’s too soon, really, to step back and make sense of all of it, so at this just-home stage i’ve little but a mosaic of moments i’ll not forget, and which i’m scrambling to scribble onto the page in hopes of holding on for a good long while. among the litany i’m pressing to my heart, re-looping through the sleepless jet-lagged night, there are these:

awaking on a rain-sodden morning when the country lane was still puddled, and the branches dripping diamond-like droplets of morning drink, and stepping into the soundscape of magpie and rook and lowing cows and calves. the whir of the milking machines beginning to rumble before the roar.

arms that reached out to wrap me in the minute i knocked on the door and introduced myself as a long-lost cousin, no questions asked. the rounds of drink at the pub that night where we gathered to tell tales above the lilt of harp and fiddle. and the hilarity of the cousin who moaned, “oh jezus!” when i asked if they might have a prosecco. and when i leapt into the self-mockery right along with her, she continued on, “you’re in a pub in a wee town, jezus, what are ya thinkin’?” or words nearly to that effect.

harp and fiddle in the “snug” at friel’s pub in milltown malbay

driving down country lanes that turned like corkscrews (in fact one set of directions included the name “corkscrew hill,” and i feared dear blair’s heart might skip a beat or two, if not pause altogether), and threaded through ancient arbors where branches on each side of the road reached out to join hands.

the plates of food that arrived with herbs from the sea and tendrils of sweet pea, the butter from cows who sleep in the fields, under stars and moon each night and chew the sweet grasses by day, the fish you imagine leapt from streams just beyond the kitchen where little more than heat was put to flesh.

the hilarity and wit. of just about everyone. from the taxi drivers in dublin to the tattoed and multi-pierced fellow clearing away your luncheon plates.

the charms of signs like: “matchmaking goat farm.” do they matchmake goats or give you a choice? a mate or a goat, your pick. (photo to come!)

the english food market in cork, a veritable labyrinth of fresh-from-the-earth-and-sea delicious. a butter chicken pie in a crust so flaky the only apt desciption, according to what i witnessed in the expressions of my boys, might be (excuse my language) “orgasmically delicous.”

a whole museum that heralds words, and language, poetry and wit, the Museum of Literature Ireland, where Copy Number One of Ulysses basks under glass, and whole rooms are filled with epigraph upon epigraph, one of those rare places on the globe where human language and its infinite configurations are held up as priceless treasure.

the straight-from-a-storybook propietor of the Dublin pharmacy, Sweny, where on page 88 of Ulysses, in the chapter “Lotus Eaters,” Leopold Bloom buys his lemon soap. the drippingly elegant gent who, upon barely-whispered request, broke into Gaelic song while sipping from his vat of burgundy wine on the eve of Bloomsday.

i’ll turn it over here to a bit of Joyce and his telling of Sweny’s:

“The chemist turned back page after page. Sandy shrivelled smell he seems to have. Shrunken skull. And old. Quest for the philosopher’s stone. The alchemists. Drugs age you after mental excitement. Lethargy then. Why? Reaction. A lifetime in a night. Gradually changes your character. Living all the day among herbs, ointments, disinfectants. All his alabaster lilypots. Mortar and pestle.”

the bookseller Séan in Milltown Malbay, the town from which my people hail, whose shelves near collapsed under the weight of thousands upon thousands of tomes, with that telltale musty smell of words embalmed in ancient ink, and dusts of time a welcome attribute.

the countless times we heard the sympathies for us pitiable americans who at the moment seem to find ourselves under the rule of the “feckin ijeet.” eye rolls every time only served to emphasize the point. one cousin told us they keep keen eye on news from america as if it’s real-time soap opera leaping from the daily news.

the infinitely comforting knowing that 45 years after my first and only other trek to the land of forty shades of green, it’s truly not too changed. sure, there are homes built bigger and sturdier than i’d seen before, but ancient thatched roofs are not a rarity, stone walls still scythe the hillsides, a geometric grid that bespeaks hard labor never shirked and an undying reliance on the old ways, and town centres present row after row of storefronts in kaleidoscopic colors, no pink too pink, no purple or orange too vivid. as one new friend, a poet and old irish professor, told us: in a land so gray, a language rife with wit, and a townscape of vivid palate is but necessity.

my friend Tadhg Ó Dúshláine, poet, writer, professor of Irish

and i shall let my poet and professor friend tadhg close us out here with these words sent to me upon our arrival home….

It’s just after 8.00 a.m. here in West Kerry, as I look out at the sun rising over the top of Mount Brandon, the holy mountain of the Navigator, across the bay of Smerwick Harbour (google Battle of Smerwick). The ebb and flow of the sea and the steadfast reassurance of the mountain reminds us that the flux, change, coming and going, restlessness, which is part of the human condition, is reflected in the sea; just as our eternal destiny is represented by the mountain, to which we lift up our eyes, in the awesome wonder of faith and hope. At times like this I embrace Isaiah’s vision: ‘… and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares’, le cúnamh Dé.

Bíodh lá maith agat agus fan slán.

Tadhg.

may you too take the necessary journeys of your heart and soul.

while away, i got notice from my little library that a book i’d requested was waiting on the “hold shelf,” and before i got back in the door, i began to read. it is so fine a read, i am leaving it here on the table should you be poking around for a summer wonder. a new read: raising hare: a memoir, by chloe dalton, described as “a moving and fascinating meditation on freedom, trust, loss, and our relationship with the natural world, explored through the story of one woman’s unlikely friendship with a wild hare.”

and whilst in the little town of milltown malbay (pop. 921), from where my people hail, we stumbled into Seán’s Bookshop, an emporium of well-read books all but falling off the shelves, and curated by a bookseller with twinkle in his eye, and tales to tell till midnight sundown. there, i plucked a tome from a poet i’ve read too sparsely till now. the book, rapture, by carol ann duffy, winner of the 2005 t.s. eliot prize, is aptly described (per the irish times): “brilliant, beautiful, and heart-aching.” here’s but one of its beauties:

p.s. happy blessed birthday this sunday to my most beloved firstborn, and law professor, will. soon to be teaching within a morning’s drive away, at the university of notre dame law school, another dream come true, prayer answered, and holy wonder for all time.

sweet will with one of ireland’s top barristers, brendan grehan, who shared his silks and wig for the occasion.

what journeys home have called to you, those taken or not yet taken?

and may the full sunlight of the solstice warm you and bring radiance to your soul….

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May 3, 2024

sunshine girl

i tend toward the grays. and i don’t mean the pewter locks atop my head. i refer here to my meteorological preferences.

i’m of celtic persuasion, which means a pigeon-colored sky, preferably with mists rolling in, a landscape without shadow, for clouds are in the way, that’s the sort of day that wraps me like an afghan dropped from heaven’s hutch, makes me feel cozied by the hearth, deeply much at home.

give me a gray day and i all but purr.

this week, though, has been anomaly. the sunbeams of this latest swatch of springtime have been pouring in full proof, and voluptuously so. sunbeams so pure, so concentrated, i’ve bridled the urge to stick out my tongue and lick them––as if a gelato on a cone. or gulp, as if a nectar in the most delicate cut-glass flute that ever was.

it wasn’t lost on me how novel it was for me to be fixated––and bedazzled––by the motes of sunlight shafting in. it shook me from some rafters i’d not even realized had boxed me in. i was paying attention to my paying attention. an attunement to the nth power. and the simple substance that transfixed me was but one of that elemental trilogy: sunlight, water, air.

to live in a state of fine-grained attentiveness is the instructive of every sage or prophet who’s walked this sunlit earth. for us to notice celestial shifts, as winter turns to spring, as the great star is jimmied higher into sky, must be God’s rapturous delight.

and i must have been more sun-starved than i realized after a long and washed-out winter, for i couldn’t keep myself inside the house this whole week long. i was all but stripping bare my crepe-papery arms and legs, so my famished flesh could guzzle sun. and, every chance i got (and even those i didn’t have), i found myself down on my knees, at the garden’s edge, wherever tender growing things gave me excuse to coax and coddle and slapdash in the dirt.

from nearly sun-up to sundown, i was out and about, clocking miles on my soles, slip-sliding along a river trail, dodging red-winged blackbirds who tried to perforate my noggin. and, when my legs and knees were tuckered out, i sat splotched in sprees of golden light as i perched, robin-like, atop a rock or stoop, keeping watch on flutterings in trees.

i’m not typically a sunshine girl. despite a nomenclature suggesting otherwise.

my papa and me (aka his “sunshine girl”)

long long ago, there was a fine irishman––my witty papa––who pinned a moniker on me back in the days when i’d take him by the hand and maybe reach just beyond his knees. he called me his sunshine girl, his one and only, and it’s a name that makes my knees go limp even to this day.

i’ve not heard his voice in 43 years, but i can see the glint in his eyes, the way the pilot light burned bright and brighter, as he warmed up to pronounce the words, deeming me his sunlit girl.

i rather fail my reputation.

in the long years of his absence, i’ve grown more inclined to sunshine’s shadowless counterpart, the days some define as “the color of bad weather.” i protest, tend to be of a mind with leo da vinci, the polymath and painter, who insisted “a gray day provides the best light.”

though not this golden-glowing week. and not without exception.

like the poets emily D and annie dillard, i like my light in slants, or as dillard put it once: “i’m a collector” of such angled penetrations. the oblique is how i see things best.

most days, pure drenched feels too exposed. the white light of summer’s height makes me wither.

springtime, though, is tender season. and the sunlight comes in slant, in perfect concentration. and every once in a rare while, in days as delicious as the sun-drenched string that was this week, i’ll gulp my yearly dose of solar plenty. and i’ll gulp it without pause.

speaking of sunshine and the irish, here’s a line that made me laugh aloud this week:

“the sad truth is that, like fish, the looks of the irish are not improved by sunshine . . .”

—Niall Williams, This is Happiness, page 193

and as is my wont, i’ll bring mary oliver into the conversation, as she came to mind more than once when i was down on my garden knees this week: in “the summer’s day,” she writes:

“I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. /  I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down / into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, / how to be idle and blessed.”

and, lastly, i zoomed into a poetry conversation with the poet (and yale institute of sacred music professor) christian wiman the other day, and he was asked to read a poem that shocks right through him, and here’s the one he read:

Prayer
by Carol Ann Duffy

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child's name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer —
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

(the four names in the last line are towns called out on BBC radio’s nightly “shipping forecast” for the various seas around the british isles, waters divided into 31 sea areas, including rockall, malin, dogger, and finisterre. the broadcast litanies, especially the late-at-night ones, are for many britons––including carol ann duffy––a familiar touchstone: the announcer’s voice reciting the sea areas all around the islands, one by one, forecasting the weather. and, higher up, minims are the half-notes in a page of musical notation)

of all the meteorological options, which one most floats your boat? and how and why?

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pull up a chair

Tag: Carol Ann Duffy

June 20, 2025

irish bath

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sunshine girl