‘Walking with the Weather’ by Medbh McGuckian
Through his eyes. Those diaphanous
Hands, on the dawn which follows
The midnight after a death.
Their nearness lent a new weight
To the interlocking between angels,
Blackmarket lemons on a forest day
When I cottoned on to this and ruled
The winter, in a sheltered river whose
Mouth is hidden, since death itself is
After all an angel.
In Milton angels were a mirror
Of God’s thoughts, though they themselves
May not be eternal, they caused
The fall of one third of the stars.
Our rage for angelic protection softens
The olive wood angels, the answering
Angel by way of dreamfast. Each
Of our souls is sown in a star, or stored
Away in the planets by the angel
Christ, the earth of the soul is a climate
That secretes its own light.
Our shallower companion, Time, is an
Envious shadow, plaiting hair that looks
Like air, our cloudy child of black
Summer fires. You have to rely on moonlight,
The best red of self-willed land with its
Occasional outbursts of willow, the creeping
Advent of the river’s personhood, the ID
Weather sensations like a yellow archangel,
A variant of seasonal radiance. If words
Were said but not recorded, the expected
Weather is wrong.
When we weather a place we have memories
Of winds and mid-green leaves – and not just
Any weather. Earth is always on the move,
Using weather events and weather ways, child-
Weather, slow–walking moments outside the storm.
We cannot know the weather from the outside,
Skin should be rethought, weather happens to us,
More than human weather, the presence of rain
Is the geography closest in. I look at
The weather three times a day, hoping for clear
Airturbulence.
Hoping it will show us some mercy. We not only
Touch a breeze, we transform water, you feel
Nothing but it melts. A hard wind adds
A layer of meaning to our thinking weather,
To make weather useful to all the weather
It suffers. Another handful of summers with
The rate of meadow loss, as shade trees flex
At how we weather the world. Beyond the
Footprint of the bypass is an alpine clarity
From Celsius days in January and the dump
Of the atmosphere.
Through ghost forests a new tree is a soft promise
Of shiny white lithium, out into the shared sky.
It was going to be curtains for our country,
Some might ask what such dismantling
Is worth, we’re talking about a long time ago.
To be partially buried, by air vacating a room,
Or gardens of piano-absorbent foliage,
Each key into your teetering countryside
Frees the cloud storage in the computer
That will fully understand it, as out as one can
Imagine, without killing trees.
Medbh McGuckian was born in 1950 in Belfast where she continues to live. She has been Writer-in-Residence at Queen’s University, Belfast, the University of Ulster, Coleraine, and Trinity College, Dublin, and was Visiting Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. She is Honorary Lecturer at Queen’s University’s School of Arts, English and Languages Department.
Her books (published by the Gallery Press) include Venus and the Rain, On Ballycastle Beach, Marconi’s Cottage, Captain Lavender, The Flower Master & Other Poems, Selected Poems, Shelmalier, Drawing Ballerinas, The Face of the Earth, Had I A Thousand Lives, The Book of the Angel, The Currach Requires No Harbours, My Love has Fared Inland, The High Caul Cap, Blaris Moor, Marine Cloud Brightening and The Thankless Paths to Freedom.
Among the prizes she has won are England’s National Poetry Competition, the Cheltenham Award, the Rooney Prize, the Bass Ireland Award for Literature, the Denis Devlin Award, the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, and, in 2002, the Forward Prize for Best Poem. She received the American Ireland Fund Literary Award in 1998 and an honorary Doctorate from the University of Aberdeen. Medbh McGuckian is a member of Aosdána.
‘Walking with the Weather’ is one of three new poems by Medbh McGuckian featured in Issue Fourteen of The Lonely Crowd, which will be published at the end of this month.
Main photo: Jo Mazelis. Author photo: Paul Maddern.