I got this wonderful message this morning from Alan O’Leary of Copperplate: Thought I would share this beautiful heartbreakingly sad poem of Dermot Bolgers with you all.
I am reminded of my first sighting of Seamus Ennis in the 70’s.
He was booked to play at The Chariot Inn in Ranelagh and was introduced, while he was tackling up the talking got louder and didn’t diminish during his first set of reels. Seamus stopped playing and announced “my contract for this evening does not include providing background music for your conversations, goodnight”. And off he went!
Seamus Ennis in Drumcondra by Dermot Bolger
I see him leave that flat we shared
And walk down Home Farm Road,
Black coat buttoned against the wind,
A countryman’s hat pulled down,
And in his hand a battered case,
Containing the set of uilleann pipes
Found in fragments by his father
In a sack in a London pawnshop:
A jigsaw nobody could piece together
A hundred years after they were crafted
By Coyne of Thomas Street in Dublin.
He carries his case like a secret dossier
That no passer-by could decode
As he boards a bus into the city,
Unnoticed among the evening hordes.
Times are hard, our flat threadbare,
He survives on tins of steak and kidney pie,
On meals that he cooks at odd hours,
When he tells yarns and truly comes alive.
There is rent to pay, a meter to be fed,
Afternoon visits to the local launderette
Nights of wind rattling the rotting windows,
When he spreads his coat over his bed.
This is the price of making music,
Of living the life for which he was born,
He is on his way that night to perform
For little pay to a meagre audience
In the back room of a Dublin pub,
With a television blaring in the lounge.
Ignoring the jarring cash register,
Three dozen people sit, transfixed,
By a set of reels learned from his father
Interlaced with grace notes and tricks
Picked up from pipers who are ghosts,
Who died recorded only by himself,
Who never learnt music, wrote nothing down,
But carried the tunes in their minds,
Knowing that with their own deaths
Dozens of nameless reels would also die.
Ennis plays with due respect for the dead,
In his one good suit, a white shirt and tie.
From “The Frost is All Over‘,
a collaborative performance of music and poetry, which was staged this weekend in Dun Laoghaire, with poetry by Dermot Bolger and music by two of Ireland’s master musicians, Tony McMahon (who shared a flat with Ennis in Drumcondra) and David Power
To get Alan O’Leary’s fine Irish Music podcast just visit here: http://alanoleary.libsyn.com/
{ 3 comments }
Glad that you liked this poem. It was based on a story that the great Clare musician Tony McMahon told me about when they both shared a flat in Drumcondra, just around the corner from where I live. It is one of two poems about Ennis from my sequence, The Frost is All Over, which is published in the book External Exiles by New Island. The secone one is below. Best wishes Dermot Bolger
The Frost is All Over
(i.m. Seamus Ennis, piper & collector)
At Christmas in the cottage bearing his name
A packed crowd sways as musicians play.
The Naul village is quiet, a sky bereft of stars
Breathes webs of frost on windscreens of cars.
Awakened by the tunes he once collected
The bronze statue of the piper under the tree
Stirs himself, his stiff fingers elongated
As he lifts the chanter and pipes off his knee
And takes a cautious step across the square.
In his coat pocket a half-bottle of whiskey,
In his head the notes of thousands of airs
Still jostle and cling to life in his memory.
Songs collected in Irish clubs and building sites,
In Birmingham and Brixton, Battersea and Crewe,
White shirted men softly playing the squeeze box,
Lonely men singing about the Sweet Mountain Dew
Between shifts at the Vauxhall car plant in Luton;
Men, who once laboured with asphalt and asbestos,
Rasping out final breaths in flats in Camden Town
With the district nurse their sole weekly caller;
Men who tuned to Radio Eireann in kitchenettes
Hemmed in by foreign voices through cavity walls,
Desperate to hear a fiddle amid the static and forget
The damp odour of exile and the cross of loneliness.
The ghosts swarm to join him in the frosted square
Like they swarmed as boys to hiring fairs in Strabane
And queued on Dublin quays to board cattle boats
And waited at dawn in Kilburn for contractors in vans.
A lifetime of being herded and praying to be chosen,
Of pints and tin whistles shyly produced at gatherings.
Remember me, one of them begs the bronze figure,
You recorded me one December in Wolverhampton,
You came back to my bedsit, the only soul I ever let in.
I sang with my eyes closed amid my few possessions,
And it felt like I had only to reach out through the dark
And every face I left behind would be there to touch.
Play The Bucks of Oranmore, play The Frost is All Over,
Play for ghosts eternally condemned to be The Wild Rover.
Play for those picking mushrooms in the fields of Athenry
From Estonia and Lithuania, from Lagos and Paraguay.
Remember us, Seamus, we entrusted you with song
In Yorkshire mill towns that never felt like home.
Our legions left no footprints amid the wet cement
But you drank with us and gave our songs worth
In bothies on farms in Strathclyde and Arbroath.
We wander in limbo now, the forgotten remnants
Of an army recruited from hillside and tenement
To go abroad and send home a weekly remittance.
Strap on your pipes, Seamus, as each ghost flits
Around your cottage window to hear our tunes
Renewed in the young musicians’ fingers and lips.
Dermot Bolger
You’ve made my day Dermot, that was beautiful. I’m lost for words!
Dermot,
Thanks for your contribution. I saw your Drumcondra poem in the Irish Times some time ago. You really understand the soul of the emigrant and the lode of playing God’s music, you must play a bit yourself. Long may you continue to log our dark thoughts and paint such brilliant verbal canvases. Long may you thrive.
Beir bua,
Alan O’Leary
Copperplate
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