A Soft Day in Ireland

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For Joe McNamara

 

One afternoon in Ireland a while back
Joe called from his office in Plano, Texas
And we talked for hours

 

I got wired-up on the excitement of all this and all that
Running off on tangents, which is easy
Frothing, because one thing here is rooted in the next
It’s a small place, buried under too much history for too long, yet
It’s no secret that whereas some people never learn
The Irish find it difficult to forget

 

Anyhow, the sun had moved across the sky a little bit with all this talk
The shadows from our garden ewes had moved across the lawn
And we are still at ten fourteen and Brian Boru, a thousand years ago
I said I must be holding you
But no, he said, this is very interesting

 

We strode from there in leaps and bounds
From a painting at the National Gallery
The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife by Daniel Maclise
Depicting the fall of the ancient Celtic order
And the dawning of the Anglo-Norman millennium
From there, to another Irish masterpiece upstairs
A sixth-generation Irish-American, Hazel Martyn from Chicago
Her arm around her daughter Alice
After Velasquez, John Lavery’s household in what he called The Artist’s Studio

 

I tried to say to Joe that these moments, frozen in high art
Are nothing short of the monumental turning points
The Anglo-Irish-American axis finally rotating
Driving the course of history around a long-awaited bend

 

She imagined it, asked her husband to paint it, and he did
She drove Michael Collins to Downing Street in her car
And he signed the treaty granting independence
After seven hundred and fifty two years, waiting

 

That same slow-moving axel turned again in nineteen ninety eight
A two-year ceasefire followed by a signed agreement in Belfast
To share power and put an end to conflict here, for once and all
Harry McKillop had just toured the notorious Maze Long Kesh prison
And thought to follow thru
With some initiatives to help this thing
To add some glue
To add his fingertips as Heaney puts it in The Swing

 

And Joe was listening still to all the endless drone of this and that
‘And let me get this straight’ he asked
‘They all will now assemble in a flapping tent
Sit at tables set for hundreds and together start to straighten what was badly bent’
Yes I said, and sworn enemies, and Dukes and Earls and Excellencies
Will raise their glasses to a great humanitarian
Forgetting all the barbed and broken past
Move in this former prison, once a frightening place
To start to work together
With amazing grace

 

We undertook to try to get the message straight
Worked for days and weeks to iron it out
And as we had envisaged bit by bit
They came in one’s and two’s that day, to stand and sit
To mark another turning point in Ireland

 

They came
And that was it

 

 

 

Hay Machine (e)