A Memory of Dublin Upon Hearing
of the Death of Seamus Heaney
Heaney is dead
and the Irish will
write the epilogue as is
right and fitting for so
great a man.
Upon the news that I saw
in The Times today I
recalled a word or two
of his that brought me
back to the Dublin of one
long fall ago while first
walking up O’Connell Street,
then turning to the bank of
the downstream flow of
the Liffey.
Seeing there the Monks,
brown Franciscans, they were
ladling the morning oats while
handing out their thick bread
along with the fantasy that is
eternity into the mouths of
the terribly poor.
Not the modern Ireland
then, there literally was a
tinker that morning exposing
her breast to me,
with a tiny one clinging
there, and begging alms
on St Stephens Green as I
thought they may have done on
Bloomsday or even on that far
more distant day when that bright
copy of the Book of Kells first
came to Trinity.
In 1972 it was still an ancient Catholic
place, without the charm of Rome,
and the rage was on then to kill,
in some quarters, a random English
soldier up north.
That drunken night,
in the hotel bar on
Denmark Street, around the
corner from the Sinn Fein,
I heard the rage and justification
for acts so foul that I lost
all illusions about the transcendent
beauty of their language and saw
everything there was to see of
their other side.
I heard the drum and smelled the
body paint of a primitive, most
primitive, tribe.
Being Ireland of course
it wasn’t all
that way.
In the same bar
where the death
threats flew and my life
was seemingly at risk for
suggesting that bombing pubs
was criminal, was Bridget,
who tended bar but looked
too young to do so,
And lovely lady that she was, she
Told me that they were “Just Drunk”,
“Didn’t Mean It”, and would forget
all about it come morning.
Late, quite unexpectedly,
the very next night
when, after dealing with my
hangover, I closed the place
down yet again, she ever so
sweetly grabbed my hand and
walked me across the street to a
tiny top floor flat,
smiling broadly, whispering softly
as we went up those stairs,
“Now, you promise not to make
me pregnant now boy,
don’t you.”
Heaney has died and the Liffey flows
as generations know that, in truth, that
the simplest word is sometimes best,
as the convolutions of one time
sire the next.
After a long hiatus and residence overseas, John Huey returned the United States and to writing in 2011. Since then, he has appeared in numerous online and print journals as well as three anthologies. A fourth anthologized piece will appear soon. His full-length collection, The Moscow Poetry File, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2017. www.john-huey.com
