John 11
Sweaty hands touch my garments as I scoop water from the well. No one understands: the voluptuousness of the sun, the scent of breeding women, copper-colored. The chickens pecking at my toes, the cacophony of chatter the busybodies the visitors with their mitzvahs and challah. Still Martha clucks about me like a brood hen oiling my skin, clipping my nails. And her endless braying about Jesus, Jesus... Kneeling I speak of the unredeemed souls I have seen. Tiny cymbals din. The voice of another rises in my throat.
Cushla, ere long I will become pure
light as will the bairn whose cry
withers the very words I speak.
Place her then in the crook of my arm.
Under the tile by the fire
find a few shillings. Take
my shoes, my wedding ring.
God is good. Traverse the Tullaree Road.
If you come upon bread
bless it, break it...
§
Mother, when the tide turns
to the wind the great roaring
will whip through the bracken
and crack the willow’s skin.
’Tis not this day I’ll be going surely.
God is Good? Not as good as thee,
beloved. Here, I’ll warm thy hands and feet
with oil and scent, cushion the baby’s head
against your milk-spent breast.
’Tis tears enough we’ve spilled this day.
Wisha, last night I beheld yourself
astride a white mare with a silver mane
hurling a gelid star against the moon.
How they shipped the barrels of grain from Cork while our tongues swolled, how they muzzled our language ’til those scorched tongues sputtered nothing but blather. An orphan’s haven they christened the empty granary where we, who could still lift, piled up the childer’s bodies one atop the other like leaves in the Book of Kells. The stench of too many bodies in such a small place. So his family could die unviewed, our neighbor, Fitzhugh, boarded them up in the cottage we helped him sod. For a lick of piss poor soup we forsook the old gods and became High Church. True, the Atlantic was a bowl of bitter tears. What matter? Our souls already flapped like tattered sails. Our lips blistered, our gums bled. On the edges of Manhattan, we searched like rabid dogs for all we’d lost. But, daughter, this I will tell you: a shank’s mare from here sheep speckle green hills spotted with Fairy Thimbles. At least we have work and store-boughten bread and of an odd Sunday maybe a bit of beef. Though shrill cries still poison my sleep, I can still recall the auld poems and isn’t that an Inishkillen sky lumpy and gray threatening with God’s good rain?
Starved with the cold,
frizzy-haired Aunt Tess,
shadowed by her raggle-taggle toddlers ,
sweeps into our Bronx kitchen
on a Sunday morning after Mass
clutching bags of flaky seeded rolls
and donuts oozing raspberry jelly.
She thrums her fingers on the table,
A cup of tea and a tune,
she says, to warm the hearth;
bursts into I just stopped in to say hello.
I’ll only stay awhile.
And we chime in,
I long to see how you’re getting on,
I long to see you smile.
The silence of her baby Francie
and our brother Butchie
still torches our songs.
Rain-sopped and jet-lagged, she huddles
with her ash-faced sisters
on Tollymore Road, black purses snug
in the crooks of their arms. The soldiers
yank out the Renault’s back seat, rifle
through luggage, check underneath.
Do you fancy us gun-runners
from the states, she asks.
’Tis ashamed you should be.
A stone’s throw from here
Bobby Sands starves himself to death
in Long Kesh.
Passports, please, says the Brit,
stiff-lipped and full of spit hardly
a wisp of hair on his chin.
And aren’t you named for the Queen herself,
he asks. Not a tall, my soft-syllabled mother says.
Christened Lizzie I was. Fifty years gone
from this blighted isle, and still this.
This.
Shikata ga nai
August 15, 1945
Each day in school we vow to die
for Hirohito, file past his icon with eyes cast down
as if nine suns might blind us. Even in dreams
his white wings blaze. When we hear his voice
—an ordinary voice like any other—
It can’t be helped
we are struck dumb except for Rika who mimics it exactly
—a twelve year old in tattered shorts
speaks with the voice of a deity—
Now dry-mouthed
we fear rutted stones in a dismal swamp,
fear tears slipping into rank tea,
—fear fear itself—
Broke like bent reeds,
we wish to extinguish ourselves
as the golden kite
spirals
to the quivering earth,
as the chrysanthemum’s petals crimp brown.
Engine 75, a fire every forty minutes. In the Eighties the whole fucking Bronx was burning, tenements torched by junkies, landlords, neighborhood kids. Nobody cared except the displaced and the firefighters. And you, my brother, savored being a cog in it, loved careening around corners of cobbled streets, sirens screeching. My God, you said, the heat, the stench of burning skin made you want to give up sin. As a kid you scaled ladders, slid down the pole in Engine 83, helped polish the brass bell. Which fire seared your larynx, scarred your carotid, caused a stroke? Now your old captain guides you down flights from your condo, drives you to lunch. Once you carried two children out of an inferno, one on your back, one in your arms, the floor above collapsing. The wind groaned about you, fed the flames. All you can recall is the great roar.
Liz Dolan’s poetry manuscript, A Secret of Long Life, nominated for the Robert McGovern Prize, Ashland University, has been published by Cave Moon Press. Her first poetry collection, They Abide, was published by March Street Press. Liz has won the following prizes: The Nassau Prize for Nonfiction, 2011, and the same prize for fiction, 2015; The Cobalt Review’s Baseball Poetry Prize, 2014; Delaware Beach Life’s First Place Poetry Prize, 2012, and Trellis Magazine’s First Place in Poetry, 2008; The Gypsy Satchet Award in Letters from Fiction Fix 16. She has also received fellowships from the Delaware Division of the Arts, The Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Martha’s Vineyard Writers’ Residency. Liz serves on the poetry board of Philadelphia Stories. She is most grateful for her ten grandchildren who pepper her life and who live on the next block.