Liberty Bell, and: A Ruin in the Midlands, and: Ship in the Night, and: The Ages of Pleasure and Suffering

Liberty Bell

for Brendan Kennelly

The little park is quiet and empty.No sign now that once in the pastit was the cholera cemetery.Jonathan and Stella are still togetherunder the Liberty Bell.The bell ropes swing and the bells begintheir carnival of sound, their rollicking.

Under a sky of ashen cloud,in the greyness of FebruaryI discover again my Viking ground:Brick dust, bone dust buried deepbeneath stone walls and cracked concreteof a back lane daubed with tales out of school.

This was where they came,the strange and stranger hordesof Norsemen, Redcoats, and Cromwell's recruitswho planted cabbage seedand kindled fires on which they cookedhogshead and Liffey eels.

A Ruin in the Midlands

But I woke in an old ruin the winds howled through

—W. B. Yeats

Back in the age of candlelight and grandeur,of banquets in the chieftain's mansion,there was meat and drinkfor the ladies and the lordsand tunes upon the harpsichord.

But all that is history, the candle-factoryceased to prosper, ceased to exist.In the ruins of the chieftain's mansionthere are trespassers in a state of bliss.They are there for the dope and the pills.

There's a cider-party, a ghetto-blasterblasting Lady Gaga; chicken bonesand burger wrappers littering what remainsof the halls of marble, rooms without tapestrieswhere phantoms go about their useless tasks.

Ship in the Night

Falling from the ether, coming in on the tides,the Age of Aquarius arrivedwith its wild cavorting sounds.

In the heaven-on-earth small houseI was the boy who listened for hoursto radio broadcasts from a ship in the night.

A ship far from shore, with nowhere to go—that hoisted a flag of convenienceabove its cargo of songs in the morning,

songs in the moonlight,the chanson of the chanteusewho kindled desire in every man she knew—

my night-companion who sang me to sleepwith her blues that she blewin on the tides and out of the ether.

The Ages of Pleasure and Suffering

There was lightness of touch when the chisel's tap tapblended as one two figures in marble:the seated Madonna and the son on her lap,a dead weight weighing her down.The woman's expression drained of bloodis one of mother-love or lamentationover limbs that are broken, flesh that seems wasted.

With irrevocable brushstrokes they made the worldlook antiquated, the old masterswho recorded the ages of pleasure and suffering,gave human physique to the classical deities,depicted Sebastian as poster boystripped to the waist, strapped to the pillar,clad in the arrows that kill him.