Oisín’s Journey Home
A Poem of Place and Journey
Niall McElwee
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Carcinogenic Carriages: The Story of Locomotion
The story of locomotion and the railroads is closely linked to the development of Canada itself. There were very many vocal opponents of the proposed transcontinental railroad, in fact, it was referred to as “an act of insane recklessness”. It took until 1881 for a railroad of 2,900 miles linking Montreal to Vancouver to gain commitment. In the Province of British Columbia alone, it took 22,000 men to construct 600 bridges and trestles and they had to blast 27 tunnels thru the coast area mountains. In one period, a man died a day and no more than six feet of ground was laid with track such were the conditions faced by those rail pioneers. It was far easier laying track over in the east where as much as 417 miles were laid by 1882. In both locations Irish, Chinese and Indian laboured together.
The human heart is pumped with hopeful beats and one often found tents pitched along proposed routes with the hope of the rail passing thru. Indeed, Calgary in Alberta started off as ‘just a cluster of tents under the open sky hoping for a train to pass on by’. Not too far from Calgary lies Inis Fail.
There is something inherently romantic about the entire railroads experience in Canada and, for me, it evokes the true frontiers spirit that one associates with a country such as Canada. But, the Great Steel Horse was not welcomed by all First Nations and Metis peoples and was not necessarily seen as progressive. First Nations peoples were shamefully exploited by the white man. Just to take a few examples, the wrappers of tin cans were given over to Indians as change for their annuity dollars by unscrupulous traders, their buffalo bones were sold on as fertiliser and they were regularly not informed of changes in plans or details. In this, some Irish were complicit.
Why this Poem?
I started writing this reflective piece after the death of my mother, Christine, from cancer – hence the central character, Oisín seeks comfort within the steel-hulled ‘carcinogenic carriages’ which hurtle across the beautiful Canadian landscape. The carriages hide their cancerous cells well thru their anonymity. I did not return to attempt to complete the poem until late 2005.
And so Oisín removes himself from a fairly miserable post Celtic Tiger Ireland where mobile phones are held by practically every man, woman and child, DVD’s and MP3’s bulge in jacket pockets and he jumps aboard the great North American Locomotive. What better way to see a country than thru the rhythm of a train as it crosses tracks and trucks.
Oisín is headed west in our poems, west of Europe, west of Leinster, west of the Shannon, west of the Maam Mountains, west of the great Atlantic Ocean, west of the Salishan. I like the idea of Oisín fundamentally staying west of center. This has been my life.
Glossary
A Gaelic name reputed to have the meaning ‘sole strength’. A number of Irish heroes held this name such as Oengus Gai Buaibthech (of the terrible spear). Another , Oengus Ceile De, was a noted reformer of the early Irish church and his feast day is celebrated on March 11th.
Algonquin
A member of any of the North American Indian groups speaking an Algonquian language and originally living in the subarctic regions of eastern Canada. Over a period, many Algonquian tribes migrated south into the woodlands from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic coast (Source: The Free Dictionary). The original peoples were nearly wiped out by the Iroquois and by European diseases.
Banba
In Irish mythology, Banba, daughter of Ernmas of the Tuatha Dé Danann, was one of the patron goddesses of Ireland. Her husband was Mac Cuill. With her sisters, Fodla and Ériu, she was part of an important triumvirate of goddesses. When the Milesians arrived from Spain each of the three sisters asked that her name be given to the country. Ériu (Éire) won the argument, but Banba is still sometimes used as a poetic name for Ireland, much as Albion is for Great Britain.
The LÉ Banba (CM11), a ship in the Irish Naval Service (now decommissioned), was named after her. Initially, she could have been a goddess of war as well as a fertility goddess (Source "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niamh").
Battle of Gabhra
When Cairbre, son of Cormac Mac Airt, became high king of Ireland, he wanted to break the power of the Fianna. Cairbre believed that the Fianna had become too powerful and arrogant. Furthermore, Cairbre did not like paying tributes to the war-band for the protection they offered. Cairbre conspired with other provincial kings, to destroy or disband the Fianna. He raised a huge army to face the Fianna. Munster was the only province to support the Fianna.
The battle took place at Gabhra, in Leinster. Fierce fighting erupted, with the Fianna; the Fianna were heavily outnumbered. Cairbre and Oscar, the son of Oisín, fought in a single combat, where Oscar killed the king. Oscar was also dying, when his father found him covered with countless wounds. Weeping, Oisín and Caílte bore Oscar's body away.
According to this tale (Cath Gabhra or "The Battle of Gabhair"), five warriors murdered Finn at Garristown (Gabhra). While in the Aided Finn (The Violent Death of Finn), Aichlech Mac Dubdrenn killed Finn in battle at Ath Brea (Ford of Brea). Casualties were extremely high on both sides, however, only twenty Fian warriors survived the battle. The Fianna was defeated and the power of the Fianna was broken in Ireland. Caílte Mac Ronan and Oisín were the only two surviving heroes of the Fianna (Source: Timeless Myths, J. Joe).
A chief of the Pabaksa or Cuthead band of Yanktonai Sioux in the early part of the 19th century; also known as Shappa, the Beaver. Lieut. Z. M. Pike saw him at the great council at Prairie du Chien, Wis., in Apr. 1806, and pronounced him the most gorgeously dressed of any chief he met (Source: Geneology.com).
Chinese Immigration Act 1885
This act placed a $50 head tax on every Chinese person entering Canada following the successful completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR). This act was meant to reduce the number of Chinese entering Canada, as it was believed that they wouldn't adapt well to Canada's then-burgeoning agricultural society. No other ethnic group had to pay this tax. The act was rewritten in 1900 and 1903 to increase the head tax to $100 and $500 respectively (Source: Canadian Encyclopaedia On-line).
Expectocracy
A term coined by David McWilliams in his book, The Pope’s Children (2005), to describe the Irish youth (post Celtic Tiger) in terms of their many expectations and love of instant gratification.
Hako Ceremony
For
the Hako ceremony of the Pawnee, in which the Corn Mother plays a
central role, two main groups take part. One group, the Fathers,
initiates the ceremony and pays a ritual visit to the second group,
the Children. These two groups cannot belong to the same clan of the
tribe, and very often they are members of completely different
tribes, a considerable distance from each other.
The term Hako
refers to the various items concerned in the ritual, especially the
pipe stems which feature prominently (Source: Sacred
Hoop Magazine, No. 6, 1994).
Gethzemane.
The place in which Jesus Christ suffered the Agony and was taken prisoner.
Grand Trunk Railway
A railway company incorporated in 1852 to build a railway from Toronto to Montreal. In 1853, it amalgamated with five other railway companies, and traffic on the line opened in December of 1859. It continued to grow, supported by financing from Britain, but, by 1860, it was $72 million in debt. Canadian government financing saved it. Continuing to buy competitors and expand, it declared bankruptcy in 1919 and was absorbed by Canadian National Railways (Source: Canadian Encyclopaedia On-line).
Immigration Facts
After Canadian Confederation in 1867, thousands of Irish, Chinese and First Nations labourers were imported as workers to build the Canadian Pacific Railway.
Intercontinental Railway
A railway built to link the Maritime colonies with the province of Canada. The first portion of the line was opened in 1858 between Halifax and Truro. There was some difficulty with financing, and ultimately the completion of the railway became a condition of Confederation. The last gap between Halifax and Montreal was closed in 1876. Freight rates were kept low to promote trade, the result of which was deficits. The federal government covered losses until 1919, at which time it became part of Canadian National Railways (Source: Canadian Encyclopaedia On-line).
Irish Canadians
A group of immigrants from Ireland who came to Canada generally in the early 1800s. Since many were poor and had little money for travelling into central British North America, many of them settled in the Atlantic region of Canada. However, in 1847, a particularly devastating potato famine in Ireland caused many to migrate there, even though many were in such poor health that they died of starvation on the journey. This immigration continued in droves into the 1860s, but many would use Canada as a resting point before continuing on into the United States. Comparatively few Irish would immigrate to areas west of Ontario. Some Canadians viewed the Irish as a threat in the 1860s thanks to the Fenians (Source: Canadian Encyclopaedia On-line).
Mi'kmaq
Aboriginal
people living in eastern Canada. At the time of European contact, the
Mi'kmaq occupied the Gaspé and the Maritime provinces east of the
Saint John River. Since then, they have also established settlements
in Newfoundland and New England. The Mi'kmaq language is in the
Eastern Algonquin family of languages (Source: Canadian
Encyclopaedia On-line).
Niamh
In Celtic mythology, Niamh was the daughter of Manannan mac Lir and Queen of Tir na nÓg. She fell in love with Oisín, poet and son of Fionn mac Cumhail, and rode to Ireland on her horse, Embarr, to get him.
Oisín was a member of the Fianna and, though he fell in love with Niamh and returned with her to Tir na nÓg, he became homesick after what he thought was three years. Niamh let him borrow Embarr, who could run above ground, and made him promise not to touch Irish soil.
The three years he spent in Tir na nÓg turned out to be 300 Irish years. Whilst travelling through Ireland, Oisín was asked by some men to help them move a boulder. He tried to help them from his horse, but he fell, and upon touching the ground he instantly became an old man. Meanwhile, Niamh had given birth to his daughter, Plor na mBan. Niamh returned to Ireland to search for him, but he had died.
The LÉ Niamh (P52), a ship in the Irish Naval Service, is named after her.
(Source "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niamh").
Oisín
The name derives from the Gaelic for Deer or Stag. Hero of Irish mythology, made famous by WB Yeats in his long poem The Wanderings of Oisín, Oisín rode away from Ireland and lived with his partner, Niamh, in the paradisical land of the ever young (Tir na nÓg); pining for his former friends, he was warned by Niamh never to alight from his steed and touch the earth on his return visit or he would forfeit immortality forever and their happiness.
Pacific Scandal
The Pacific Scandal was the result of an improper granting of a contract to build a railway to the Pacific Ocean. Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald had solicited $360,000 to help win an election in 1872 from Sir Hugh Allan, and awarded him the contract soon afterward. Liberal politicians under Alexander Mackenzie, and newspapers controlled by the Liberals, revealed this to the public and the government was defeated in 1873 (Source: Canadian Encyclopaedia On-line).
RailwayAct1851
An
act passed in Canada West and East in 1851 to set the ground rules
about how railways could be built and maintained. This was to prevent
fly-by-night railway companies from cutting corners on construction
and maintenance, and ensure the safety of railway builders and
passengers (Source: Canadian
Encyclopaedia On-line).
Reserve
Land
set aside by the federal government for status Indians. Though the
government owns the land, the particular band that lives on the
reserve is responsible for managing it (Source: Canadian
Encyclopaedia On-line).
Sod Houses
A type of home on the rural Prairies, usually before World War I, that was made entirely out of hard-packed blocks of earth or sod. These homes were cheap and relatively quick to build, which was a necessity considering many settlers to the region during that time usually didn't have money nor time to construct a proper brick-and-mortar home during their first seasons of farming (Source: Canadian Encyclopaedia On-line).
Stoney
Stoney are a First Nation Peoples indigenous to Canada. Also known as the Stoney-Nakoda or "Rocky Mountain Sioux." They are related to the Assiniboine in language, but some members of these tribes have cultural and language differences. Oral legend has it that these Aboriginal peoples have lived at the foot of the Rocky Mountains since the beginning of time, but were part of the Lakota/Dakota nation on the Prairies (Source: Canadian Encyclopaedia On-line).
Slemish
When St. Patrick, the Patron Saint of Ireland, was sixteen he was allegedly captured by raiding Irish pirates, brought across the sea to Ireland and sold as a slave to Miliucc. As a shepherd slave, he tended Miliucc's sheep on Slemish mountain in County Antrim. While a slave in Ireland, Patrick had an epiphany and became much more spiritual than he had been prior to his capture rising before down and going to pray in hail, rain or snow.
Waiting for Godot
A tragicomedy in two Acts written by Samuel Beckett. The plot revolves around two tramps who are waiting by a sickly looking tree for the arrival of M. Godot. They quarrel, make up, contemplate suicide, try to sleep, eat a carrot and gnaw on some chicken bones. Two other characters appear, a master and a slave. A young boy arrives to say that M. Godot will not come today, but that he will come tomorrow. In fact, he does not come and the two tramps resume their vigil by the tree, which between the first and second day has sprouted a few leaves, the only symbol of a possible order in a thoroughly alienated world.
Prologue
There
was a time in this fair land when the railroad did not run
When
the wild majestic mountains stood alone against the sun
Long
before the white man and long before the wheel
When the green dark
forest was too silent to be real
But time has no beginnings and
hist’ry has no bounds
As to this verdant country they came from
all around
They sailed upon her waterways and they walked the
forests tall
And they built the mines the mills and the factories
for the good of us all
- Gordon Lightfoot, The Canadian Railway Trilogy
The Long March West Begins
I
wish I was the brakeman
on a hurtlin’ fevered train
crashin’
head long into the heartland
like a cannon in the rain
with the
feelin’ of the sleepers
and the burnin’ of the coal
countin’
the towns flashin’ by
and a night that's full of soul
with
light in my head
with you in my arms...
- Mike Scott & The Waterboys, from the Record Fisherman’s Blues (1988)
1 Embracing Embarr
Came then a storm of starving ravens
so black the sky was blotted out,
circling ruts of lines and wagons
in vain for spillage was nil
or nearly
And so finally even the ravens
doubted him
Banba dead in Calgary.
Mother, I crossed oceans and lands
scattered the very leaves
to touch again your delicate hand.
I jumped aboard the carcinogenic train.
The promise of a re-railed Grand Trunk Railway
and star-lit skies with sweeping road front trees
kept him going spiritually:
Irish-First Nations Foreman took him on.
Shovelling the light red Atlantic sandy mixture
with adult musculature
it still took him two Leonard Cohen CD’s
to mix the barrels of cement.
Oisín,
son of Fionn mac Cumhail
Hard at it
the shovel, an extension of his groin,
Cohen cranked on and on within his soul.
Here, at least, Oisín would make it past western Ontario.
Here he might regain the Beaver pelts
for his kind.
Oisín.
The dreaming west of Ireland labourer
hired by a Halifax firm of Irish Jacks.
Who slaved beneath the dusty boardwalk
sweating with post 1885 Act Chinese
Dusty dropouts and general white trash.
Another child of the Celtic Tiger.
Irish nigger
North America.
11 of Moccasins and Kings
44 First Nations in Three Treaties Areas of Alberta
The Blackfoot, Cree, Chipeweyan, Dene, Sarcee, Stoney Speakers
Oisín, who remembered hitching the previous September
westward across the cornlands of Alberta
(giant harvesters swung into horizons).
Row on row of seed-shafting splendour
the sun luminous on their golden thighs.
Corn in trucks.
Liquid gold transport.
Those prairie sod houses practically broke our souls
The old bones murmured in the earth.
And Stoney kind scattered the birds
in ghettoes of forest crowns
as extinction loomed.
All futile now.
How plaintive their songs to Mother Corn!
The elaborate details of Hako ceremony!
None left to see the footprints of children
mirrored in the prints of their moccasins.
See the stalk of wheat standing
He is my younger brother
Always Christine caught up with him:
He remembered his mother walking in
to mock him in his terminal drowsy sloth.
“Get up, get up” she shook him
as the train echoes on.
So Oisín came
Defying sleep
Defying slumber.
The droop of eyelids
The nodding head
In his, in someone else’s
Gethzemane.
For time asleep
Was a winter’s day with no log fire,
A broken date,
A quarrel beyond repair.
Time asleep,
Poe’s toasted slices, black and charred and cold.
Oisín
eases his nomadic frame into the carriage.
It is night.
All lights burn bright.
The black night duty porter
Himself’s consumed by darkness.
Like a frightened embryo,
Oisín
touches the moving inner walls
of his chosen womb.
It is cold
he is told
The train will soon move
out.
Where it will breathe thru sands and fickle reeds
Finally bring him to his loved ones in Montreal
And
The St. Patrick’s Day parade.
And Niamh.
Oisín, dollar hoarder, worker on the roads, on pumps of Canadian gasoline,
and down-town Moncton building sites,
once a bog tanned twelve year old west Ireland lad
fed a diet of Connacht rugby, cowboys, trappers and knackers.
The soda bread and skim milk of his dreams.
Since a youth he had been mimicking
like the ancient song makers, the Cree drummers.
Oisín had long looked west
put himself to the test
of Cordilleran heroes.
He now longed for Quebec and, perhaps, a few kindred Patrician
kind.
The train thundered on thru the prairie darkness
like a shocked and frightened girl,
dawn crept in with moccasins.
Chief Red Thunder in the seat opposite
sprawls dead beat to this world.
Oisínreflects on their conversation
Of dead beat dreams, dead kings
And Morrison.
111 The Ghost Dance Religion
The Pine and Spruce-Lined Lakes
The Algonquin are fallen into disillusion.
“My Children, when at first I liked the whites I gave them shelter.
I gave them fruits.
Ghosts of our head feathers sing on their skyscrapers.
We dance until daylight in hunger of spirit
and no one sees us in blossom or kind.
we cry out with thirst to abandoned Gods
and we place no drink or water or call their names.
The fallen Messiah, the one with the whirlwind maybe.
He wants to come, is late that we might know one another”.
The railway dead are alive in the sun’s yellow rays.
The prairie wind stirs again the wolves and the long grasses.
Far away
The whirlwind raises dust on the March Slemish of longing
Nearby
the rocks and streams are ringing with bright metals.
Our hills were melted down for cheap light.
“Mother, I will come home to stop my younger brothers crying.
I have eyes like yours and ribs like yours
Because I am poor in tears, I pray for every creature.
This is the secret of the Oriole, the human heart,
the palpitant.
Do not the red streams of my veins run towards you?
No one was ever lonely when with you.
You were very handsome
Your soul could be the centre of souls”.
An old prairie chief reminded Oisín
“Even the brown buzzard can be scalpless and happy
In the ashes of the burnt houses”.
Oisín spoke like in the old days.
“Better the breast plate of the Warrior than Patrick’s
Where we soul friends live that I should wander.
Where hibiscus blooms in the doorway
There I shall wander.
On the corn trails
On the horse trails
I will wander”.
IV The Carcinogenic Train
For
there was a time in this fair land when the railroad did not run
When
the wild majestic mountains stood alone against the sun
Long
before the white man and long before the wheel
When the green dark
forest was too silent to be real
When the green dark forest was
too silent to be real
And many are the dead men too silent to be
real
- Gordon Lightfoot, The Canadian Railway Trilogy
Reawakening of
imaginative
streams
take this train
take this trip
- Home?
A taste of home
and is it ever again
possible?
Some beauty
some magnificence
bloomed once with esparta in this country.
Some humans,
Some honey in dry vacated trunks.
Indians claiming the expanse
on stallions stolen from the Conquistadors.
Power for an inkling between their First Nations thighs
seeing their beloved buffalo.
Food for song for thought.
Deerhides for Tepees.
V After Tapestries, Trails and Tales
And after love
A life of action.
Dreams beyond the stars.
Oisín
by the friendly vultures of the sunlit prairie skies picked
clean.
His bones on skins birch stilts, to bleach and fall
to earth in time and hallowed clean
by the cicada in an airy place.
Some short centuries ago
the white settlers came
manly, Genesis with women lurching in their wagons.
The stern fist. The stern eye. Future stengun children.
Code makers. Code breakers.
Their lights now, flash ugly, bright and neon.
To their front, a son, a gentle deity
but at their backs rage for the rampant grey spire
and temple
It was not bread they wanted, but flesh,
and Oisín’s and mine in the dwindling air
as they sent us on their coffin ships to the bright Americas.
Found it, and us
In 1851
an airless place.
VI Lonesome Traveller
Oisín.
Duffle bag, this sojourn soul in the Great Lakes of St Lawrence Lowlands
sutured at his side,
pillow and constant companion
bisexual, transexual, hetrosexual aids of the night.
His jaw was angular.
His jaw was bronze.
His jaw was detective comic handsome.
Oisín
gentle in love,
his hazel eyes
swelled an even deeper hazel dreaming of Niamh.
Yet hazel either was hardly the word
those pupils of almond with a golden sheen
(since he first tasted love as a teenager)
shone now in the darkness across new Saskatoon.
Oisín
Still had his razor foam,
toothbrush, two pairs of regulation faded levis,
two pairs of socks, two cotton shirts that reeked of salt and sweat.
A Claddagh sweater, black as basalt, that did his wandering spirit no justice.
These in the stomach of the bag
where his entrails lay waiting for their ultimate embrace
trembling for a reawakening.
O, would these few things be his gentle epitaph?
Would he too, embrace darkly, the last, lonely furrows
of hoboland?
An aged clan still reach him there?
Hobo youth too lost on the mountains of Slemish
among the wormy-assed sheep and the hungry hogs and their bickering wives?
No. He would never go home
Not in rural boozy Sunday hazes would he find his end.
Not for ever in the troughs of acids find his doom.
But in the arms, and on the breast of one
or more of those he could call friend.
Why matter then the why or where?
Oisín
He still survived
made out the winter in cold towns in icy
prairies.
Fuel attendant, with pump frozen in his fist.
His fingers numb, his breath spiralling
off into the winds sweeping away from the Rockies.
He
choked on the smell of gasoline ether
where fellow Chinese and
Irish exiles before him died.
Penury, and no hope.
Soup kitchens.
Those forgotten great granduncles:
Their old stitched leather bags
lasting longer to comfort them, held together
in gnarled fists with the last faded thongs of homeland memories
of lost streams and May hawthorns in their souls.
VII Gods of the Underworld
Oisín.
Whatever words and shapes
and forms there were
slid surreally down University corridors.
Investiture.
Divestiture.
Still he wasn't sure.
Would test them always against life.
Alive. Alive.
Begrudger of deaths little slices,
sleep.
Jobless.
Graduate of Galway's Liberal Arts
tailored youth of many parts
Riding the great Trans Canadian Locomotives.
Oisín.
who felt at home and younger by far
then the ancient redwoods of a Reich nightmare.
As if restored by his natural habitat.
Always in his minds eye, the apple tree.
But, it must be the scented one
the same that tempted Aengus on.
The golden apples overhanging oblivion
with sweetness, juices, for plucking and tasting.
He would lyricise the apple
masticate it to the core,
digest its goodness over and over.
Oisín.
The train beginning to chatter
across a hackyned landscape.
Even in the new world he was old.
No longer unique.
Still his own helicon
Waited for his lips alone.
VIII The Battle of Gabhra
“We were paid by the White Settlers in can wrappers”.
And Oisín remembered a deepwood spring
coming alone to a white rimmed falls
fear had not ventured to since the Battle of Gabhra.
Deep in Saskatchewan country
Speckled chinook salmon freely swam
amid sprigs of watercress and sprigs of lime.
Oisín scooped up the eight all madly plunging
added to the feast and the swopping of stories.
Even in Canada the forests recede
their carcinogenic ferns explode
and trees meekly fall to pulp.
For the day's deliberations recorded long ago within sappy rings
dead orioles and blind Viscos sing.
The red clay limitless everywhere.
The scorched brushwood blows underfoot
like demented souls that have no friends.
And as the train climbed the timber frozen landscape
like one intoxicant on a drink of spring Oisín’s fingers gave the v to everything, everything.
In that carriage
felt vulnerable. For the killers
opposite vented their carious breath in his face.
Their gory handlers too were inchoate
with fury at his innocence. A hard time
they'd had of it reaching to the top
maiming bison meat and thighs
along the Trail
corrupted to rails.
1X Fear and Loathing
Oisín.
Huddles in the black shell of carriage sixteen,
cocooned and comfortable.
Earlier scrap yards loomed, vacant of souls.
Loveless forms, those chrome tipped cars
in abandonment from brazen highways
no youth to make love in them
parked now in the affections of scrapdealers.
Or none.
Waiting for Godot the dealer.
Waiting for the great crunch
the recycling of bones
and metals.
How can we ever begin to imagine
The loneliness that is each of us
How can we ever begin
Oisín mused?
The search for the spark
for the ignition
that will move us
side by side
and then forever
on parallel rails.
He saw their sad and shattered eyes
From which the light had long since gone
The final beam on and the daily dim
Beseeching him, beseeching him.
Do no abandon us in this place,
Do not abandon us in this place.
El cemeterio de los automoviles
At the carriage window
A sole Hispanic crossed himself and wept.
What spirit on that metal groaned
Cried out to him to touch?
He never knew but rode past on the prairies
En route to this Niamh and those St. Patrick’s men.
Came the children
From the viscera of Alberta
And the molten steel
Flowed the cars, lorries, mile long trains of the continent.
And twelve Pontiac trucks
Gleamed in the sun light
Defying nature and dank rust.
In the morning sun
on the siding an old train
caught his eye
An iron horse rusting
into oblivion
Majestic in the Pullman days.
Black men in black suits
Obedience.
White faces in black suits
Dominance.
The familiar story of that continent.
And now clanking of steel, ungreased and slow
Carriages were used for cheap steel hulled cargo.
Oisín dreamed, drifted in and out
Of slumber, dreamt himself
a hobo jumping the train
sneaking on easier than expected in
the best of times, the worst of times
job cuts in abundance
good times renewed
the beatnik fifties
the gonzo eighties,
the Celtic tiger nineties
leaf pickers.
Train hoppers all
Myths of progress
Ultimately.
In dreams, in lies
Oisín had seen Poe’s interminable slices
harden and grow stale.
Fit for the bin.
Three nights he watched
lain awake like a Seventh Day Adventist
till sleeplessness drew him back within her melting thighs.
X Path on the Rainbow
A shotgun blast.
The harsh chambers echoed in his slumber.
Who was this figure at the intersection
silhouetted against the skyline
pumping shot at defenceless carriages
and wind swept windows?
The slow train inched like a Morrison image
With a slight curve from where the snowed over
points
were bedded
like a Penis, coming but peppered with shot.
terrified passengers rushing
to the floor
headlong
to where the engine throbbed.
All this shooting from a mere barn
where red roosters ran blindly for cover.
But this was not to be Oisín’s judgement day.
A gunman, alone and methodic
angry Augustine blasting the generations
guttural with guilt and his own mutilation, successive loadings.
Power and loathing in the will of his fist;
Eros denounced because of its beauty
He falls sobbing to the earth
Police took him away.
Oisín remembered the modern Great Canadian Shield
Reincarnations with teepees, sexual skyscrapers,
And the extinct First Nations with souls of neon.
Shot after shot sliced the Orioles
Double barrelled pump action shotgun
Raked carriage windows with ‘intent and injurious vision’
And the lonely mid-dawn marksman frowned.
Oisínhad risen to meet his fate in the glass
As if viewing the scene from another continuum.
A dart in his shoulder brought him back to consciousness.
He raised his hand to the handcuffed gunman
almost in a salute.
The screams of sirens belittled the sun on the horizon
Hammers were cocked and gave no quarter.
A final spasm, a choked cry, a jerking of thighs
The falling as if forever, smoking gun cradled
The gunman fell as red bullets roughed his buttocks and brains.
Medical opinion was that no seed or shot or anything will remain.
Sirens of blue fuelled the even bluer morning.
They came to take me and you away cried Oisín.
He hummed like a Beetle, “All we need is love”.
Remembered others carrying wounded on their shoulders
Remembered the pismires he disturbed as a boy in that Galway bog
As the police zipped the gunman closed in the black body bag.
“Wished we could have lynched the son of a bitch”
Hissed the young trade executive Ben Lynch
After an all night bar crawl on a St. Lawrence greened beer.
His glass sloshing and tumbling wildly
Splattered with a handful of Patrician edges.
“Oh, Canada”.
XI Bury my Heart
Spem Reduxit
(Hope was restored)
The carcinogenic strains of Danny Boys
The come- all-yes of complacence
Rejected by new generations.
Old suppurations from old wrongs
Exploding vainly into song.
The gleaning of jobs far back home
Gnawing thru Montreal Irish.
Pressing the flesh, giving audience
Successful Sinn Fein trips & press conferences
Further south, on Capitol Hill, the March Shamrock
Blessed, but withering on the steam.
Vocalists, green-beered impressonarios
appearing on morning shows.
No Morrisons these, but full of guile.
Successful stints if measured in dollars.
The thousand carcinogenic smiles
Laughter at carcinogenic tales.
Yes, he was near home. The usual bore
No point alighting anymore.
He could no more than Sisyphus
Uplift for all the cursed stone
Entombing each new generation.
XII Full Circle
From Canoe to Canal to Railway
Oisín aq Niamh agnutmajig
(Oisín and Niamh are talking)
From their souls the gold dust is shaken
Pergations of emotion.
No Conquistadors
could ever fully drain their speechless lakes.
See their nakedness
complete their species.
Branches and liquid beams lie intertwined
their civilisations dance in a suicidal shroud.
Now Oisín watch us take pure Celtic steps
Subvert our myths in your rebellious depths.
Turned away to seek your Niamh
In gold hair, drop of sleeve.
Style of deportment style of feature
Driven by the need to need her.
Oisín turned his back on St. Patrick’s Day
rode plains and prairies to Hudson Bay.