The Penny Whistle

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For Jenny Murphy and Phelim Pekaar who are to marry soon

 

He had them for years, lying quietly in one drawer or another
Silent O’Moyle be the roar of thy waters
The sweetest sounding was a battered souvenir
Some of the worst were finely finished
He remembered the first of them was black with an ornate golden trim
With what his dim recall thought had a cork plug where it met the tongue tip

He could not play them very well, still sometimes could not put them down
Blowing and cursing and torturing himself, and a small part of the world
The few jigs and reels he tried, over and over, were a noisy anarchy
All their rhythm suffocated
Not one sweet note in the whole painful effort

It was as if the penny whistles knew
Could read his every cell as well as every breath he badly blew
As though the little things all mass produced with holes
Had ghostly powers and eyes and ears and hearts and living souls

Someone said he should adopt another grip
To hold the little silver tube less firmly
To drape his fingers loosely across the few small holes
Not to squeeze the little thing with finger tips
Nor to blow in a demanding manner

The few slow airs he practiced by the hour were lately showing signs
Something softer, more natural and controlled
Stephen Foster’s tunes floating on the soft summer air
Fred Weatherly’s accidental masterpiece was always there
Tom Moore’s melodies, the mother and father of them all

The battered one was better played without thinking
Allowing the fingers feel the tune and the heart to pump the bellows
Every now and then a simple tune would play from start to end without discord
For that again, dreadful incarnations of noise would rise up as though from nowhere

He tried at first to blow these knots away
Or whipping it swiftly through the air to unblock the little amplifier
A round spit or two he thought perhaps bubbling at its narrow neck
Clearing its throat, clogging the free flow of the musical jet

If spirits were to search the world for places to reside
I have no doubt they’d seek tin whistles out and there abide
And even sleeping in a darkened drawer
They with all their sensitivities would hear
The haunts of every lovely melody that ever was, again appear   
 
They needed some accompaniment he knew
And played upon an upright to a tape-recorder, simple cords
And runs and base with which for weeks and weeks he blew and blew and blew
He shifted without calculating from the key of D with self-same fingers
Until everything he played thereafter played in G

A more subdued and lower sounding B-flat whistle sang in a D-sharp key
All the tunes he played now sounded better
And simply everything he played now resonated in improving harmony
He never tired of hearing over and over and over now
Believe me if all those Endearing Young Charms, Moore’s enduring melody  

Not just that but Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair
On Bendameer Stream, Beautiful Dreamer and the god’s own Limmavady Air
All of these ancient Irish tunes and those they begat in the new world
Were saved from complete extinction in seventeen ninety two by Edward Bunting
Who wrote them all down for the very first time at the Belfast Harp Festival that year
Attended by the last of the great Bardic harpers

What spirits then convened and sang like choirs of angels?
None knowing each what all together were doing all at once
Saving the very essence of Ireland, preserving that which if we’d lost it then
We would not know the loss but never be the same again
 
This is what the poet Leslie meant when sadly then he wrote
How playing to a gallery of peers is common practice here without a note
Lifted higher so that the soul itself might clap and play
And rouse into oblivion, the gallery of the gods

And Thomas Moore whose way with words was perfectly prepared
Collaborated with John Stephenson who took the Belfast airs
Every bit the Lennon and McCartney combination, greater still
They fathered and mothered all of modern music’s every whistling thrill

I’ve heard it said that hope is dead
That love’s alive no longer
My penny whistle knows the truth
That nothing could be wronger 

 

                                    Hay Machine (e)