Herod's Dispensations
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About this ebook
Harry Clifton
Harry Clifton was Ireland Professor of Poetry in 2010-13. His books include Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks (Wake Forest University Press, USA, 2007), winner of the Irish Times / Poetry Now Award, and five titles from Bloodaxe, among these, The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass (2012), shortlisted for Irish Times / Poetry Now Award, The Holding Centre: Selected Poems 1974-2004 (2014), The Portobello Sonnets (2017) and Herod’s Dispensations (2019). After many years travelling and living Africa, Asia and Europe, he now lives in Dublin.
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Herod's Dispensations - Harry Clifton
To the Next Generation
These days, like the leech-gatherer
In Wordsworth, I keep the wolf from the door
Of indigence, and take the weather
On the lonely moor.
The gibbet creaks in the wind. The body is gone.
Here comes a soldier, home from the war.
Napoleon, he tells me, is no more,
The work of healing is done
And the million sutures closed, below on the plain
Where the bloods are drawn.
I ask myself private questions now, in the dawn,
About women and poems, the impossibilities
Of old age, dipping for pondlife in the rain
As a child looks up to me.
Redesdale Estate, 1956
for Catriona Crowe
First, this old clock. As I dismantle it,
A child of indeterminate age
On the garage floor, the cogs and flywheels
Buzz, the hour-hands race and stop,
Go back on themselves,
And I peer, like a little god,
In the workings of time. Steady,
The ticking starts, suburban days
Falling into place
Like memory. Glass front doors
And front room windows
Are black depths, to be looked into
Afterwards, when the time is right.
But for now, each pebbledashed house
Is a Freudian box of tricks,
Pre-conscious, locked in itself,
Respectable, safe, like Nineteen Fifty-six.
Pounds and ounces, pennyweights and grams –
A grocer’s measuring instruments
Sift reality, slicing ham
And butter, trowelling sugar in brown paper bags
For all of us blow-ins, on whom the hag
Has roosted, the hag of Ireland,
Stateless… Lord Redesdale,
Whoever you were, you gave us the myth of a State,
You left us your name
To conjure with, on your sold estate,
And fled to England, clutching the deeds.
De Valera set us down here, and bade us breed.
A new generation. A clean slate
For history to write on. Non-attachment
Our middle name. Sleepless, we hear
The cattle-drive, to the milking-sheds
Of Stillorgan, in the early hours,
Like the lost morning of a mythic race
Our fathers snore through. De Valera,
Give us our pasteurised milk, and cleanse our blood
Of impurities. Banish the gypsy horses,
Their mounds of fertile dung,
From our gardens. Tinsmiths’ fires
Will burn themselves out, the caravan train move