Next time I will write about Face Yoga ...

Here is a kind of a poem. It is called Walking at Cross

A long time ago, I wrote a poem called Run at Cross. It caused a bit of consternation locally because it contained the names of real people and while I hadn’t thought that people who worked with animals would worry if I mentioned that those animals excreted on the road, or would be upset if I wrote that someone would go to a grave to honour their dead child, nevertheless, people did get upset. That was not my intention. My intention was to demonstrate or attempt to use a form of poetry that is very old, which is the naming of particulars, particular people and particular places, as a way of keeping them alive. However, what one says, and what is received by whoever is reading what one says (and more particularly, what one writes) are two very different things.

This poem is, if anything, even riskier. It exposes me to the scrutiny of those who might look upon the admission of addiction as a kind of weakness, and the admission that I was unkind to my children as a result of my addiction (which was chaotic, but during which I was ‘functional’, as I still am, largely) as something for which I deserve blame or perhaps even punishment. I hope it doesn’t upset people excessively to admit that I am still in the throes of addiction: Gabor Mate, that great guru of addiction studies, has owned up to his own repetitive patterns of harmful habits. I am simply doing the same thing here: what has changed, for me, is my capacity to be compassionate towards my own shortcomings. It is important, I think, that we learn to make ourselves vulnerable in ways that allow other people to make connections, and to feel safe enough to admit to having been a less than perfect parent, say, or human being.

It’s not much of a poem if it requires this kind of prelude, I suppose, but I enjoyed, if that’s the right word, writing it, and please recall, too, that there is such a thing as poetic license when writing creatively…

Walking at Cross

Whole dead trees, horizontal, reaching skywards, and whale carcasses that go black and pockmarked over the dark marbled colouring of reds and greens, and stink,

all wash up here on the shore.

Unexploded mines along with black backed gulls, plovers and sometimes flocks of starlings are scattered between the pools and rocks beyond which the waves meet from either side of Cuchie Finn, or The Point, and criss cross. As though Cross Abbey were named after this phenomenon, and not the Cross of Jesus.

The sky contains all manner of weather. Sun in front and behind, rain moving north over Eagle Island. The great flat wideness of it being all stretched out like a yawn, or a gape about to scream open, it stretches the mind through space and time.

This feather in my pocket has travelled on the back of a black backed gull over oceans, through storms: born where? I see a cliff, for a moment, covered in guano, shining out of the sea. The Niamh Og, the little god that the people kept wrapped in a special cloth, a holy stone that had a little dip in the centre and had once been the pillow of a saint. The shore lined with these old stories. The priest took it from them and in a fury rowed out half way to the island and threw it overboard, cursing their paganism. It is said that the stone floated to the surface, or was in some other way recovered.

The children of Lir spent their last three hundred years on the island, their graves are there, set in the shape of a cross. This liminal space settled me for seventeen years, this flatness, shimmering silver sand, the wet reflects memories: the inevitable and uniquely chaotic poverty that addiction trails after it, neglect, and unpredictably sudden shouts punctuating long silences, a rubble of tears, and parties, flickering flames, laughter and dancing and swimming and singing to the old gods of sky and sea.

Blame lifts and floats off like a fog clearing.

I space my toes wide and balance as evenly as I can, walking quickly on the cold October sand. How can I blame myself? It’s happened now. It can’t unhappen. I’m practicing harm reduction. It’s very, very slow.

Breathe in, and broaden the mind. Breathe out compassion. The cross, criss cross of wave and tide and currents in front of the holy isle of Inis Glora. Hard not to wonder at the self revelations these sands have seen, the monks’ uplifted faces. Those who fell here, face first, into the hard slap of the sand, broken hearted or famine fevered. And me, now, here, nowhere, coming to my senses in waves of gratitude, humility and submission, for what I have been given, the grace of losing myself, of telling myself the truth of what I have been and am, but curious at the crossing between awareness and attitude, between free will and fate.