Two Poems by David Wheatley

Helen Mabel Trevor, The Fisherman’s Mother

for Ailbhe Darcy

Saint Anne has appeared to a ploughman;
Saint Anne is the fisherman’s mother,
who sowed Christ’s swaddling clothes and his shroud.
The pilgrim’s name is Misery, her
face worn like a stone by the flood. The
coiffe, the lace headscarf, can also be
worn under a hood. Should you require
it she is all Irish womanhood:
my whole life long I have sat in the
parlour under her accipitrine                                       
gaze. She is the artist in age; burns
leaves by a pond amid memories
of Frank O’Meara, malarial,
dead. The pilgrims dragged themselves three times
round the church on their bare knees, no less.
In this interior we are free
of the sound of their prayers, of the goose-
girl and her prattling-trafficked charges.
I drew a watercolour of a
watercolour left out in the rain,                                     
but could not match the solid lines of
the woman’s hands on her blackthorn stick
sweating oil paint and years. I too have
dipped my hands in miraculous springs
where pustular Jobs have filled their bowls,                  
have washed one hand with the other in
the dark not knowing who else is there; 
repeat the words of the Rosary
to someone who repeats after me,
not knowing whose voice it is I hear.

Un/Settled

arrived
from impoverished      distance unpacked
a country         my daughter has
never seen                    called her own
our current of life        diverted
unbidden         from that flow
and a migrant               tongue stitched
to the cheek     so as
to live              un/settled
in the permanence       of the other
to follow a patch          of rainbow light
across a sliding                         glass door
in one of life’s              upstairs corners
where the concealed    tracks have
led me too                   under a skyline
only I   drawing the curtains   find
            myself here     to hold up
pinned at dawn            above   the line of trees
this land I have watched          for decades now
whose guilts only                     the migrant knows
tidy calamities of sunsets         tossed
westwards        over my shoulder

David Wheatley recently co-edited, with Ailbhe Darcy, The Cambridge History of Irish Women’s Poetry.