The Wren, the Wren

by Anne Enright

when she wondered when the penny dropped for each of them. And give us a pinny to bury the wran.

She brought it through a gap that life itself had punched through Carmel’s body.

I look it up and find that our eyes eat photons, absorb them. Our eyes make images by destroying light. Like black holes. Jesus, I think. There’s nothing to say to that.

Old Brock

It was poverty wrapped as innocence, in virgin white. I was on the cusp of adulthood. The Catholic Church, with all its attempted pomp, seemed to me a cheap postcard from the eternal.

The wran, the wran the king of all birds, St Stephen’s Day was caught in the furze It was a song Phil liked, for the fact that it was a little vicious. He used to sing it every year on St Stephen’s Day, which was the slow day after Christmas. And Carmel was back further again, she was downstairs in their house in Dun Laoghaire watching her father stage his annual, kitchenshaking riot. Phil left the house by the front door and came in at the back, with coal dust on his face and their mother’s macramé shopping bag on his head; the wicker handles hooked over his ears. He banged pots, threw sheets of newspaper, climbed up on a chair and swung the sweeping brush around the ceiling light, which clanged and swung. Up with the kettle and down with the pan And give us a pinny to bury the wran. At the age of five or six, Carmel had cheered and shrieked as she was supposed to do. She did not know they had killed the little wren, in the song – or the dreoilín, as her father called the bird in Irish. Droolin, Droolin, where’s your nest? Tis in the bush that I love best.

It was a country tradition. The Wren Boys went about the place in costumes and masks, playing music and demanding money in their neighbours’ kitchens. But there was something lewd in that line – about loving a bush – or was she just imagining that now?

Consider the poet called Harvey. He is standing at the postbox, his beautiful, heartfelt letter is halfway into the slot and, he’s like, Is it, maybe, a bit mad? The envelope falls and . . . too late! His words are in the gap – sent but still unseen. That chasm from which arise Terrible Uncertainty and Terrible Joy. A place so unbearable, it is where we live all the time now, checking for the likes.

I have been working on these translations, or versions more properly, taken from the Gaelic, which is the beautiful underwater language on which all Irish poetry sets sail. I think I will speak it when I am dead – which might be blessing all round, indeed. Anyway. These versions are small treasures I picked up. They are not mine.

The bird looks me in the eye – he seems to know this is the place to look at a human being – and I look back at him. And with that smart, held connection, the story I made up for him falls away. The bird is no one’s servant. He is not dapper. Words only obscure him: the lipstick, the coral, the chiffon, the glass of port, these are all impositions on his tiny, incontrovertible bullfinch self. Even the name, ‘bullfinch’, seems a form of littering, like a sticky label fixed to his feathers.