First cuckoo, Irish poet

27th April and we hear our first cuckoo. It really is uncanny. Every year within a few days (maximum four) they arrive to bell out their duosyllabic signatures from the sparse stands of trees hereabouts, having flown, we are told, all the way from West Africa. The cuckoo always minds me of Francis Ledwidge, that Irish Nationalist, ultra working class poet ...

Was
still the barred cuckoo so real to you,

In
Crocknahara meadows by the Boyne?

In 1005 I wrote a series of poems addressed to the poets of world war one. The collection was (is) called 'On Wounded Fields'. This is the one to Francis Ledwidge ... the italicised words are Ledwidge's


 

To Francis Ledwidge      August 1887  - July 1917




 Did
you still, “Hear roads calling and the
hills

And the rivers, wondering
where I am,”

At
Hellfire Corner, sitting drinking tea

As
arced unseen that deadly mortar bomb

Which
was to end an Irish poet’s dream?




A
long way sure, from Owen, Brooke, and those

Smart
young men in smarter khaki clothes

Who
never mended any metalled road

Yet
were your brothers of the silken verse

And
knew as well as you the smell of death.

I
wonder what became of all your clan

(Nine
children to evicted farming man:)

Perhaps
your father was a dreamer too,

Dreaming, “Songs of the fields,” just as you,

His
Celtic longing more than mind can bear.

But
what genetic streak of ancient Gael

Gave
will to write and sensitivity

To
know; “And greater than a poet’s fame

A little grave that has no
name;”  tell me,

You
school-less twelve year old adrift, tell me,

Lance
Corporal Francis Ledwidge, fighting man,

Sometime
Slane Corps of Irish Nationalists

Now
Inniskilling Fusiliers, enrolled

To
kill the foe of She who’s not your friend

And
fight for her through hell’s Gallipoli.

And
how, I wondered, could a poet write

In
winter trenches on the brutal Somme

Of
lilting “Fairy Music” (“Ceol Sidhe”)?

Was
still the barred cuckoo so real to you,

In
Crocknahara meadows by the Boyne?




Always
you yearned for mother, Ireland,

“The fields that call
across the world to me,”

And
now near where the spires of Ypers stand

You
dream your dreams, denied reality,

Beneath
your wild flowers ‘till the end. 




Bryan Islip, May 1995