Sweeney Astray (4 page)

34

              

Only your hawk eye

could pick me out

who was cock of the walk once

in Dal-Arie—

 

 

 

the talk of Ireland

for looks and bearing.

Since the shock of battle

I'm a ghost of myself.

 

 

 

So mind your husband

and your house, good woman,

but I can't stay. We shall meet again

on Judgement Day.

 

36

 

Lynchseachan:

 

Sweeney from the high mountains,

blooded swordsman, veteran:

for Christ's sake, your judge and saviour,

speak to me, your foster-brother.

 

 

 

 

 

If you hear me, listen. Listen,

my royal lord, my great prince,

for I bring you, gently as I can,

bad news from your homeland.

 

 

 

 

 

You left behind a dead kingdom.

Therefore I had to come

with tidings of a dead brother,

a father dead, a dead mother.

 

 

 

Sweeney:

 

If my gentle mother's dead, I face

a harder exile from my place;

yet she had cooled in love of me

and love that's cooled is worse than pity.

 

 

 

 

 

The son whose father's lately dead

kicks the trace and lives unbridled.

His pain's a branch bowed down with nuts.

A dead brother is a wounded side.

 

 

 

Lynchseachan:

 

Things the world already knows

I still must break to you as news:

thin as you are, and bare, your wife

pined after you, and died of grief.

 

 

 

Sweeney:

 

A household when the wife is gone,

a boat that's rudderless in storm;

it is pens of feathers next the skin;

a widower at his bleak kindling.

 

 

 

Lynchseachan:

 

Sorrow accumulates: heartbreak,

keenings, wailings fill the air.

But all of it's a fist round smoke

now you are without a sister.

 

 

 

Sweeney:

 

No common wisdom I invoke

can stanch the wound made by that stroke.

A sister's love is still, unselfish,

like sunlight mild upon a ditch.

 

 

 

Lynchseachan:

 

Our north is colder than it was,

calves are kept in from their cows

since your daughter and sister's son,

who both loved you, were stricken down.

 

 

 

Sweeney:

 

My faithful hound, my faithful nephew—

no bribe could buy their love of me.

But you've unstitched the rent of sorrow.

The heart's needle is an only daughter.

 

 

 

Lynchseachan:

 

This telling what I would keep back

wounds me to the very quick!

In Dal-Arie, everyone

mourns the death of your son.

 

 

 

Sweeney:

 

Ah! Now the gallows trap has opened

that drops the strongest to the ground!

A haunted father's memory

of his small boy calling
Daddy!

 

 

 

 

 

This is a blow I cannot stand.

This sorrow is the one command

I must obey. His death fells me,

defenceless, harmless, out of the tree.

 

 

 

Lynchseachan:

 

Sweeney, now you are in my hands,

I can heal these father's wounds:

your family has fed no grave,

all your people are alive.

 

 

 

 

 

Calm yourself. Come to. Rest.

Come home east. Forget the west.

Admit, Sweeney, you have come far

from where your heart's affections are.

 

 

 

 

 

Woods and forests and wild deer,

now these things delight you more

than sleeping in your eastern dun

on a bed of feather down.

 

 

 

 

 

Near a quick mill-pond, your perch

on a dark green holly branch

means more to you than any feast

among the brightest and the best.

 

 

 

 

 

Harp music in the breasting hills

would not soothe you: you would still

strain to hear from the oak-wood

the brown stag belling to the herd.

 

 

 

 

 

Swifter than the wind in glens,

once the figure of a champion,

a legend now, and a madman—

your exile's over, Sweeney. Come.

 

38

 

Sweeney:

 

Hag, did you come here from your mill

to spring me over wood and hill?

Is it to be a woman's ploy

and treachery send me astray?

 

 

 

The Hag:

 

Sweeney, your sorrows are well known,

and I am not the treacherous one:

the miracles of holy Ronan

maddened and drove you among madmen.

 

 

 

Sweeney:

 

If I were king and I wish I were

again the king who held sway here,

instead of the banquet and ale-mug

I'd give you a fist on the mouth, hag.

 

40

              

Suddenly this bleating

and belling in the glen!

The little timorous stag

like a scared musician

 

 

 

startles my heartstrings

with high homesick refrains—

deer on my lost mountains,

flocks out on the plain.

 

 

 

The bushy leafy oak tree

is highest in the wood,

the forking shoots of hazel

hide sweet hazel-nuts.

 

 

 

The alder is my darling,

all thornless in the gap,

some milk of human kindness

coursing in its sap.

 

 

 

The blackthorn is a jaggy creel

stippled with dark sloes;

green watercress in thatch on wells

where the drinking blackbird goes.

 

 

 

Sweetest of the leafy stalks,

the vetches strew the pathway;

the oyster-grass is my delight,

and the wild strawberry.

 

 

 

Low-set clumps of apple trees

drum down fruit when shaken;

scarlet berries clot like blood

on mountain rowan.

 

 

 

Briars curl in sideways,

arch a stickle back,

draw blood and curl up innocent

to sneak the next attack.

 

 

 

The yew tree in each churchyard

wraps night in its dark hood.

Ivy is a shadowy

genius of the wood.

 

 

 

Holly rears its windbreak,

a door in winter's face;

life-blood on a spear-shaft

darkens the grain of ash.

 

 

 

Birch tree, smooth and blessed,

delicious to the breeze,

high twigs plait and crown it

the queen of trees.

 

 

 

The aspen pales

and whispers, hesitates:

a thousand frightened scuts

race in its leaves.

 

 

 

But what disturbs me most

in the leafy wood

is the to and fro and to and fro

of an oak rod.

 

 

 

Ronan was dishonoured,

he rang his cleric's bell:

my spasm and outrage

brought curse and miracle.

 

 

 

And noble Congal's armour,

his tunic edged in gold,

swathed me in doomed glory

with omens in each fold.

 

 

 

His lovely tunic marked me

in the middle of the rout,

the host pursuing, shouting:

—The one in the gold coat.

 

 

 

Get him, take him live or dead,

every man fall to.

Draw and quarter, pike

and spit him, none will blame you.

 

 

 

Still the horsemen followed

across the north of Down,

my back escaping nimbly

from every javelin thrown.

 

 

 

As if I had been cast

by a spearsman, I flew high,

my course a whisper in the air,

a breeze flicking through ivy.

 

 

 

I overtook the startled fawn,

kept step with his fleet step,

I caught, I rode him lightly—

from peak to peak we leapt,

 

 

 

mountain after mountain,

a high demented spree

from Inishowen south,

and south, as far as Galtee.

 

 

 

From Galtee up to Liffey

I was swept along and driven

on through bitter twilight

to the slopes of Benn Bulben.

 

 

 

And that was the first night

of my long restless vigil:

my last night at rest,

the eve of Congal's battle.

 

 

 

And then Glen Bolcain was my lair,

my earth and den;

I've scaled and strained against those slopes

by star and moon.

 

 

 

I wouldn't swop a lonely hut

in that dear glen

for a world of moorland acres

on a russet mountain.

 

 

 

Its water flashing like wet grass,

its wind so keen,

its tall brooklime, its watercress

the greenest green.

 

 

 

I love the ancient ivy tree,

the pale-leafed sallow,

the birch's whispered melody,

the solemn yew.

 

 

 

And you, Lynchseachan, can try

disguise, deceit;

come in the mask and shawl of night,

I won't be caught.

 

 

 

You managed it the first time

with your litany of the dead:

father, mother, daughter, son,

brother, wife—you lied

 

 

 

but if you want your say again,

then be ready

to face the heights and crags of Mourne

to follow me.

 

 

 

I would live happy

in an ivy bush

high in some twisted tree

and never come out.

 

 

 

The skylarks rising

to their high space

send me pitching and tripping

over stumps on the moor

 

 

 

and my hurry flushes

the turtle-dove.

I overtake it,

my plumage rushing,

 

 

 

am startled

by the startled woodcock

or a blackbird's sudden

volubility.

 

 

 

Think of my alarms,

my coming to earth

where the fox still

gnaws at the bones,

 

 

 

my wild career

as the wolf from the wood

goes tearing ahead

and I lift towards the mountain,

 

 

 

the bark of foxes

echoing below me,

the wolves behind me

howling and rending—

 

 

 

their vapoury tongues,

their low-slung speed

shaken off like nightmare

at the foot of the slope.

 

 

 

If I show my heels

I am hobbled by guilt.

I am a sheep

without a fold

 

 

 

who sleeps his sound sleep

in the old tree at Kilnoo,

dreaming back the good days

with Congal in Antrim.

 

 

 

A starry frost will come

dropping on pools

and I'll be astray here

on unsheltered heights:

 

 

 

herons calling

in cold Glenelly,

flocks of birds quickly

coming and going.

 

 

 

I prefer the elusive

rhapsody of blackbirds

to the garrulous blather

of men and women.

 

 

 

I prefer the squeal of badgers

in their sett

to the tally-ho

of the morning hunt.

 

 

 

I prefer the re-

echoing belling of a stag

among the peaks

to that arrogant horn.

 

 

 

Those unharnessed runners

from glen to glen!

Nobody tames

that royal blood,

 

 

 

each one aloof

on its rightful summit,

antlered, watchful.

Imagine them,

 

 

 

the stag of high Slieve Felim,

the stag of the steep Fews,

the stag of Duhallow, the stag of Orrery,

the fierce stag of Killarney.

 

 

 

The stag of Islandmagee, Larne's stag,

the stag of Moylinny,

the stag of Cooley, the stag of Cunghill,

the stag of the two-peaked Burren.

 

 

 

The mother of this herd

is old and grey,

the stags that follow her

are branchy, many-tined.

 

 

 

I would be cloaked in the grey

sanctuary of her head,

I would roost among

her mazy antlers

 

 

 

and would be lofted into

this thicket of horns

on the stag that lows at me

over the glen.

 

 

 

I am Sweeney, the whinger,

the scuttler in the valley.

But call me, instead,

Peak-pate, Stag-head.

 

 

 

The springs I always liked

were the fountain at Dunmall

and the spring-well on Knocklayde

that tasted pure and cool.

 

 

 

Forever mendicant,

my rags all frayed and scanty,

high in the mountains

like a crazed, frost-bitten sentry

 

 

 

I find no bed nor quarter,

no easy place in the sun—

not even in this reddening

covert of tall fern.

 

 

 

My only rest: eternal

sleep in holy ground

when Moling's earth lets fall

its dark balm on my wound.

 

 

 

But now that sudden bleating

and belling in the glen!

I am a timorous stag

feathered by Ronan Finn.