FLAGHOPPING And Other Poems

This is the title poem of the book: FLAGHOPPING In Baile an Mhóthair there 's a smell of fried fish from a house on a corner tucked into a hill beneath the walls of Dún Fearbhuí. A cock-robin, who must have been very old indeed, puffed up his faded grey-tinged breast and sang in a potato plot below the road beside a weed-free cabbage patch lately planted where onions had been harvested and now were laid to dry under a south facing wall. Swallows gathered on the wires and starlings fed in noisy whirring flocks on purple-headed thistles, grass, yarrow and meadow-sweet while two old ladies proud parade in island garb their mothers wore. Flag-hopping like town teenagers the ladies now perambulate from evening Mass, meandering in divers directions amongst breast-high parallel grey stone walls that shelter primroses and harebells in seasonal succession. In fissures in the stony crust I saw discarded trappings of modernity half hidden by folds of once green fern turned gold and rooted in sparse soil trapped in crevices zig zagging across the limestone slab now damp and shining in the island mist, itself a mystery medium, like pooled quick-silver lately wrung and spun from bright red cinnabar. Some hydra-headed thistles grew near Ceann Gainimh bristling like crew-cut American tourists in Galway while three-toed tracks of a solitary herring-gull, come to feed on stranded flotsam, left a straggling trail across the sands wet from the receding tide. A pattern like coal-black flames was left imprinted on the shore formed by the rills of wave remnants as they back-flowed across the sloping beach washing the light layer of silver that thinly lies upon the blue-black grains piled up like dust around an old coal pit. Black-tipped feathers tumble before a soft breeze off the sea from whence their source, a drowned sea-gull, was washed ashore and left there high and dry. Near Calamore a startled pair of skylarks swoop up over a stone wall and dip behind a pair of pillars in the shape of tar barrels and clearly moulded by them, their encircling cement ribs leaving me wondering how they got the barrels off again when set. Between the two unfinished piers a beached currach stood on it's keel - a wooden slat to save the stretched tarpaulin in it's coat of pitch - while a pair of men in yellow oilskins stood beside the gunwales untangling skeins of tangled net from fresh caught rust-coloured rock-fish, brown pollock and shark-like dog fish and a few pink gurnet which they deftly skinned and gutted with short sharp knives and the skill of surgeons washing the harvested white meat in the waves lapping at their feet and discarding the inedible to the wheeling clamorous gulls that circled over-head and cried in high pitched hungry calls as they swept with swift wing-beats like cirrus cloud in mare's tails in evening skies across the surface of the sea to snatch the visceral tit-bits from the waves to swallow them in one greedy split-second gulp. The white moon of early evening ascending over Inis Óirr, bespoke a hymenopterous communion bread, a cotton ball in the sky. The Cliffs of Moher were but a dark shadow as the sun sank behind Inis More and moonlight enshrouded Inis Meáin.