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Rising poet-star Patricia Cantwell, Tipperary, sent me some of her poems, Summer 2003. Here are two of them. 
For the short story - Brazil - Click here

Heart Failure

My mother's house smelled of mourning.
Neighbours bringing sponge cakes and Mass cards
and "sorry for your troubles"
and "he was a great man God rest him"
and plates of ham and tomatoes and sweetcake
and the Christmas bottle of whiskey open on the sideboard
and clocks stopped 
and radios turned off 
and the mumbling cadence of the rosary and the prayers for the dead
and the row of mourners parting like the Red Sea before the pale priest
with his clasped hands and his talk of God's will
and my mother's angry rage contained within her funeral face
my father's absence present everywhere

Spring

(Body of missing scoolboy found in Donegal Bay - The Irish Times - February 28th 2002) 

What winter gripped your soul that spring day
what storms rent your small sails 
leaving you unanchored, 
no guiding star, no safe harbour here. 

She who carried you in womb water
looked on that long horizon
her grief's howl carried by the bitter spray,
lost in the cacophomy of sea and sorrow.
Your sixteen summers a garland of tears round her heart.
No Galilean fisherman let down his nets.

Borne on the belly of the waves,
drawn by the moon
the sea yielded up its treasure.Washed home on the neap tide
a cobweb of spring snow your winding-sheet.


The following poems of mine were entered in the Davoren Hanna Poetry Competition 2002, sponsored by Eason Ltd. www.eason.ie . There was a  prize fund of €10,000, spread amongst the top three winners. That's why I entered three you see - I needed the money - all of it! 
One of the poems made it into the last 600; which one they wouldn't tell me. There were over four thousand entries in all.
So, I'd better liste to what they - my friends -  tell me, "Don't give up the day job yet, Jim". But, I still like these poems. They are  bioghraphical, at least two are anyway, and the other is history - of a kind. I have no imagination.
From now on, I will continue to write similarly. But, for now, simply for my own pleasure - catharsis - whatever. 
If you like them a little too, so much the better. 
Another effort this last year, to gain from my titanic literary prowess, was to enter the short story competition of our local Beara Arts Festival. The prize of €100 for the winner, piddling in comparison to the poetry prizes, was perhaps, I thought, more winnable. I was also somewhat encouraged by being told there were very few entries.
Once more however, my brimming talent was not recognized. I came fourth - out of four entries! But, again, I like the story. It is bioghraphical too - almost. Apparently, this influenced the judge who had been alerted to the fact that it was of the "travel memoir" genre rather than a short-story one. Click here to read Brazil.
You can't win! Can you? 
Meanwhile I strive in my seashore "garret" to balance life between the main strands of fishing, computing/writing and gardening, interspersed with the myriad other little things we need to do to live even the frugal, so-called 'simple' life.


 Naked Love

My friend the sculptor,
I know him well.
I admire his work:
tree-trunks hewn into loving families and lovers,
compassionate metals pleading for justice and togetherness.

And what’s endearing is, that,
always self-doubting,
he doesn’t even know he’s great.
Today he talks little of his work,
his mind occupied by his stroke-stricken mum.

Newly back from hospital,
he struggled to keep her in her house, his house too,
as saner heads talked nursing homes.
He has oft-times proved heroic, to me, to others,
but now he’s raised the stakes of herodom to a ne plus ultra.

I came across them in the kitchen, his mother and he.
It was the warmest place, you see, as she was naked across his knee.
Someone had blundered, and the stricken woman
had smeared herself, and clothes, and bed with human wastes.

He was the first on the scene, a nurse still hours away.
He lifted her to the bath, removing her sodden clothes.
With one arm coiled around her, he ran the water
and washed her every part.

I arrived, as he wiped her bum again for the umpteenth time, crooning softly into her ear.
Shocked at the sight of naked oldness, the appalling intimacy of the scene,
I backed into the corridor, muffling my greetings.
Naked love is not a pretty sight!

Soon, he happily came, wheeling his shining mater before him.
There was a spark in her good eye that I hadn’t seen before,
of pride, of love, who knows?
Not even her back-to-front dress could lessen the fact
that her son was a scrupulous artist,
who did not separate art from life but lived and worked in the same human space.

Some day, perhaps, in the magic of creation, she will be a tree-trunk, a reverse Pieta: he, a saint.

Love Bites

I had a dog. 
He loved me.
I loved him.
My intimate tussling with him,
his warm, wild, dog-smells intoxicating
as I closed my teeth on his wolf-like mane,
were as close to sensual joy as ever I indulged.

He arrived as a pedigree present:
only later, contritely owned-to as a mongrel.
A product of accidental Alsatian and Elk-hound lust,
he was beautiful.
I called him Hieronymous Bosch.

My bride suspected, when I rambled and tumbled with the dog,
I was being somehow unfaithful.
She did not know - nor did I admit - she played second fiddle.

When the love of my new-born son finally challenged the dog trysts,and a menacing glint shadowed Hiero's tawny eyes,
I had to act.
One day he was bundled, muzzled, into a farmer’s truck:
he had a new home, new lovers – the children shrieked for him.
I washed my hands.

Stories of the wolf-dog on the mountain, gutting sheep and threatening men,
came finally to my business-addled ears.
Slowly, almost reluctantly, I pieced it together.  
Hieronymous was a one-man dog.

Abandoning his new home, he roved the countryside searching for what had been.
My rejection of the dog had created a monster, 
and soon, someone might die.
I had to act - again.

Gun-wise, the dog ran rings round his hunters,
growing huge on sheep-meat and blood.
I was three days on the hills, when finally, warily,
he approached, cautiously, just out of range.

Struggling with smell-recognition and confusions of loving days, betrayal and anger,  
He hesitated too long and I once more jilted him.
My grieving love was wrapped round the spinning bullet,
as it went through his skull, blending his brain.

I buried him near "Bran's Grave", Ar thaobh na gréine do Shliabh na m-Ban. 
And this place, near Fionn's revered hound, is also sacred to me;
which is partly why I tilted at the wind-power stations the greedy man 
proposed to straddle the lovely mountain with.

The brave man killed with a sword, rather than a cowardly kiss, Oscar said.
But I had killed with both. It was confusing.
I have no dog now, and keep a lonely distance from all love -
it is more than I understand.

 

Sheela na gig

(Nude, female figures carved in stone, their genitals unequivocally exposed, are known as Sheela na gigs - possibly meaning, The Nancy Boy With Breasts! They are sited in mediaeval buildings throughout  western Europe where, paradoxically, they are often found in churches. Most of the figures occur in Ireland, where, despite pogroms against them in Cromwellian and Victorian times, they have survived remarkably well. Linked wth Celts and early Christians, blamed for curses, claimed for cures, adored as goddess and condemned as whore, Sheela na gig still arouses controversy and heated debate).

Instruction to reader/performer; the bold/italicised limericks to be read with a different, raised, perhaps even squeaky - even mad! - nasal tone



In ages old when all held claim

that Earth was Woman from which life sprung,

temples and priestesses paid homage to her name,

her bounty sought and benedictions sung.

From the deserts of the East came a new kind of Beast,

Teaching Man’s dominion over all,

Promising pie in the sky, threatening vengeance from on high,

Earth Mother fell foul to a Fall.

St Bridget and Gobnait and Mary as well

replaced the Goddess now cast into Hell.

With Patterns and Stations and Holy-Well tours,

the tax-gathering sect now claimed the cures.

The Colossus groaned, whilst asserting it’s hold,

That the people would never be civilised.

With a frigid embrace, it essayed to efface,

And declared her dead and canonised.

Monastic masons heeding the past,

not yet immersed in the alien creed,

deviously endeavoured her image to cast

and plant in the walls as a seed.

These mediaeval monks, carving masonry chunks,

Ne’er intended their Sheelas to shock -

Were simply hedging their bets, ‘case the Christians were wets,

Though converted, were cute as a fox.

But, with hammer and chisel, the new druids defaced

the parts that offended their celibate tastes.

With passionate venom, they struck out to scotch

her pendulous breasts and proudly-shown crotch.


Ah! Sheela wounded, Sheela debased,

Those arrogant fools have crazed you.

They got their rocks off, by cutting your sex off,

Their Bulls without balls have razed you.

Sheela na gig was now relegated

to Evil-eye status, Balor’s dominion,

feared now, not honoured and seldom debated,

our Earth-mother tumbled into near-oblivion

But! Folk-memory survived to keep her alive.

The people swapped Earthly for Divine.

And, dressed in a veil, blue and white apparel,

She was restored, and adored, in her shrine.

Now newly resurrected in her bare-assed state,

her Yoni no longer appals,

but serves to inspire, and regenerate,

this world much-destroyed by balls.

 

* The following elongated title/introduction (tongue-in-cheek copy of the style of 19th C antiquarian, John O'Donovan - see my booklet - Sheela na gig**) was used when entering this poem in the Davoren Hannah competition. It was meant to be a bit of fun and a coded message/greeting to Billy Collins, American Poet Laureate in 2001/2, and one of the two judges of the competition. He is the "the visiting poet" of the title. I met him at Anam Cara, Beara in the summer of 2001. To a packed room, Billy gave wonderful readings from his works and especially from his new collection, Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes (Picador £6.99, 2000). The seisún in Causkeys pub, Eyeries, later, was memorable. 

 Sheela - inspired by a visiting poet, in the course of quaffing much porter and sharing our private nightmares; mine, to do with a large black man coming into the men’s toilet and resting his donkey-long penis on my acquiescent shoulder as he pissed, with a stallion’s flow, into the urinal (his, the poet’s, that is, horror was to dry up - inspirationally-wise!), to compose a poem about the history of Christianity in Western Civilisation as seen from a stone woman’s point of view, being, perhaps, the briefest and most appropriate way for me to concentrate what I know about the rude and crude stone carvings, mostly found in Ireland, and mostly paradoxically in churches, which emphasise pendulous breasts and in-your-face genitalia and which are now known, under the universally accepted archaeological term, as - Sheela na gigs.

 

** Sheela na gig, by James O'Connor, published 1991, €10.00 by post, Europe. 

Brazil

Football was the only thing on the minds of all Brazilians that spring of 1986. They were approaching the qualifying games for the World Cup.
Football, however, was the last thing on my mind. I was finally nearing the realisation of a long-held dream - to travel in the depths of the Amazon jungle – perhaps before it disappeared forever beneath the saws and Caterpillars of the loggers and beef-ranchers.
I had seen the documentaries, read the magazines and, like all concerned (paranoid?) environmentalists, was duly saddened by the impending, total destruction of the rainforests and its native inhabitants.
And for what purpose, I used to ask, is this devastation taking place?
Shamefully, it appeared to me, it was to graze the cattle that would be the ground-up makings of our fat-inducing Western hamburgers.
When I got there in Feb that year, I was stunned.
The sheer size of the country was almost unimaginable – at least to an islander from an island as tiny as ours. Brazil is 100 times larger than Ireland – almost exactly. Our green-camouflaged island dropped into the Emerald Forest would challenge even an air-search rescue mission to find in a reasonable time.
For four weeks I had travelled north from Rio by truck and river-boat – dismayingly covering but a third of the diameter of the country in that time and seeing nothing of the tropical forest.
Where was it? Could I have missed it?
Then, on the edge of the upland Matto Grosso, the first sight of my main goal was unveiled.
The vast expanse of the Amazonas – the area drained by the great river and its tributaries - stretched to the far northern, eastern and western horizons. It was a sea of forest greenery that could only be compared in magnitude to our own Atlantic Ocean, into which it drained its muddy waters far, far to the north-east. A weather factory of towering clouds seemed to emanate from its heart.
Awesome though its size appeared then, it was only some months later, when I flew over the southwest corner of these green lungs of our planet, that its scale truly revealed itself. Five hours we flew, over unbroken, flawless virgin rainforest – and this was but a fragment of the whole!
It seemed without end.
And yet, when I reached the river-port of Manaus, 1,000 miles upriver from the Amazon’s salty delta – I was surprised to hear it would take me at least a week by boat to reach, proper un-logged, virgin jungle.
In the midst of the Amazonas, I was in an island of cleared forest.
Extensive settlement and clearance in the past, followed by abandonment, had resulted in scrubby first and second-growth forests for hundreds of square miles in the hinterland. These were hardly worth visiting, as diversity and animal life had not yet fully returned to them. He really was quite convincing in his seeming reluctance to go with us at all – despite our guide knowing that he regularly lead exploring parties.
But, a fist-full of dollars (but only $10.00 in total) eventually overcame his reticence – the Brazilian cruzeiro was, after all, in free-fall then, and petrol had to be bought for the ubiquitous outboards and generator, and drink and cigarettes too.
So, Antonio agreed to be our guide for two days and nights.
The little expedition now consisted of a German, Klaus, Lawrence, an Australian, a guide from Manaus, Chico, who spoke some English and also knew a few tribal languages and equipment-wise, our pirogue (dug-out canoe) with outboard, and supplies to last a few weeks.
I was the casual leader.
The first day was heaven!
The wonderful trees with their many-bladed trunks straddling the thin soil of the jungle floor were everything I expected. The properties of plants, bark and shrubs were knowledgeably described by Antonio – I wondered if perhaps he was a witchdoctor. He had the bearing of a chief, or at least somebody deeply wise and spiritual.
Chico, whispered to me in some awe also; 'Antonio is a great hunter – he has even killed a jaguar on his very own.'
It felt comfortably safe, to be in the hands of such a brave and jungle-wise Indian.
I was in my element on the relatively cool jungle floor shaded beneath the awesome canopy. Not even an attack by disturbed bee-mosquitoes, from which we had to escape by galloping into the nearest stream and swimming underwater, dampened my burning enthusiasm.
The climate and temperature beneath the canopy even suited me – it was just like an Irish summer – buckets of rain followed by a steaming-off in intermittent sun.
Listening on that first night to the creature cries of exotic wildlife doing their tooth-and-claw stuff, was a lullaby to my happy soul as I lay in my open-air hammock.
The next day was even better.
Rare trees yielded aromatic saps to Antonio’s expert machete-cuts and, when water shortage threatened, he nonchalantly cleaved thick water vines, which yielded copious amounts of clear, refreshing liquid.
It was shortly after I saw and photographed the butterfly – the one startlingly camouflaged to look like a snake’s head - that it began.
Antonio stopped dead in a clearing. His right foot was poised off the ground like a Red Setter pointing at game: his fluttering hand-signal commanded silence.
Thus we stayed for an age, hearts pounding against our rib-cages, afraid to even breathe.
Eventually, Antonio began to back off slowly. We imitated his every move.
When he reached the trail that we had come by, he turned and raced ahead of us and, needing no further inducement, we followed as closely as our varying levels of fitness allowed.
I was last.
We didn’t stop until we got to the boat two hours later.
They were all exhausted – I was on the verge of collapse.
Antonio jumped into the pirogue, frantically signing to us to do likewise. Gasping for breath on the riverbank, however, I hesitated and asked Chico to find out what we were running from.
'The Invisible People,'  Antonio replied, 'are all around us.
This time, despite Antonio's exotic, appearance I felt there was something familiar,  slightly askew in his behaviour.
It was almost too perfect a story, a performance.
Could our Indian guide be playing us for patsies?
'We should stay and perhaps explore in a different direction', I puffed, my subsiding panic being overtaken not only by suspicion but by my peasant instinct to get value for money.
Antonio got out of the canoe and squared up to me, machete in one hand and blow-pipe in the other.
He fixed me with a stare and spoke fiercely to Chico.
Chico nervously translated; 'He says we will all die if we don’t leave this place, pronto.'
"For God’s sake, Jim, do what he says." Lawrence entreated. Klaus was nodding his assent to this energetically.
Although my nerve was slipping in the face of the peer pressure, I stuck to my guns.
'Let’s get on with it – we’ve come a long way for this and we all knew there would be some risks', I said, hopefully without a hint of the uncertainty that I was also feeling.
When this was translated to Antonio he continued to stare at me for a full minute, then, astonishingly, he fell down at my feet and began to howl in anguish!
Chico, also in a tearful gush, began to translate.
It went something like this: Antonio was saying he was sorry he had taken our money when he had no intention of staying away from home for two days. He thought he would lead us around for a day and a half, then pretend there was something wrong and insist that we return to the village. Chico added that he was sorry too, implying that he was party to the trickery.
But why? Why all this melodrama to avoid a half-day's work I asked.
And then all was revealed. They both were desperate to get back to Antonio’s hut by four o’clock that afternoon. You know why?  Brazil was playing the decisive game of the World Cup tournament that day and nobody, but nobody in the vast country would not be watching the match.
He was sorry, he and his family needed the money desperately – times were bad. He would pray for my soul and the souls of all gringos, if only I would release him to go and see the match.
What could you do?
In the face of such human suffering – and ingenuity! - there was only one solution.
I picked him up, gave him a hug – God his hair was rancid! – and rushed everyone into the boat.
'Antonio should be punished for lying to us and he should, at ze very least, be forced to give us our gelt back' Klaus insisted.
Lawrence and myself, were loudly in concert with our reply; 'Aw shut the f… up'.
The sense of urgency was contagious as we helped the outboard with paddles and sliced our way back through the choked streams.
Antonio stood in the bow, dignified again, indicating directions.
At last we came in sight of his house on the edge of the village. His wife and kids were jumping up and down frantically, obviously letting us know that the game was about to start.
Antonio, now very much the man in charge again, ushered us up the pole ladder of his house on stilts.
To power the TV, he started a Kawasaki generator on a platform underneath - which was his responsibility as head of the house. Micro-wave TV reception was unquitous, courtesy of the Brazilian government.
The large room was full with family, neighbours and now, three gangly gringos – although to be really honest, only two of the company could be described as such – I was not all that much taller than my Indian hosts and a tad broader.
I don’t remember much of the game or even whom Brazil was playing, but I was enthralled by the exotic and yet homely scene. I shared in their unbounded delight when they first scored and their ecstasy when Brazil finally won the match.
They had gloriously qualified for the finals of the World Cup.
Anxiety now shed, Antonio explained to the assembled company my part in his timely return. I became the hero of the moment and was equally toasted with their soccer-heroes.
In the process I got sozzled. The local drop, pinga, deliciously cooled with ice (nobody in Brazil goes without ice, which is traded in sack-covered blocks everywhere) and flavoured with a lime plucked from an overhead tree, were deceptively easy to drink.
Klaus, in his starched jungle fatigues, drinking water only from his own sterilising bottle, looked on disapprovingly at my going native.
Lawrence, however, needed little encouragement to join in the celebrations and soon too, his normally, beer-favouring palate was won over to the delights of the lethal local liquor.
I had a savage hangover next day - the Indians seemed fine – I wondered if they had an antidote from their forest pharmacy.
The ceremony that morning where I was presented with the ultimate Indian gift - a huge jaguar tooth from the very same cat that Antonio had killed – went largely over my sore head, but I did feel a warm sense of conspiratorial camaraderie with Antonio and Chico as they raised me - with some difficulty - on their shoulders.
The tooth, one of the two, great, curved canines that distinguishes the jaguar, was four inches long. The creature’s beautiful skin covered almost a whole wall of Antonio’s house.
I marvelled at the bravery of our devious guide in overcoming the enormous feline with his primitive weapons but, in the light of recent events, had some doubts about the veracity of the story.
The truth, as one of his neighbours told me, through Chico of course, was; the jaguar had been killed by accident when it pounced on the sleeping Antonio minding his manioca crop. His dropped shotgun had gone off, blowing the unfortunate creature’s brains out.
Somehow, this exposure didn’t make me think any less of the man, he of the consummate acting and endearing posing - and now, my friend.
On the 30th of June 2002, as Brazil beat Germany in the final of the World Cup, I took the jaguar-tooth necklace from its dusty pouch and imagined the wild celebrations that were going on in that little village by a stream-tributary of the Rio Madeira.
Antonio and Brazil I salute you.
What a country – what a people!
Now if they could only solve the rainforest issue as well ……..
Manana?