Coillbracken

Shooting woodcock and deer- 

As a townie my attitude to hunting is probably sentimental. 

A casual chat in The Hill pub sheds light on country culture in East Galway. 

I know deer can be a pest to farmers but ...

Coillbracken-East

East where the sun rises

and where the woodcock falls.

I trawl the Coill listening.

"They shoot deer," you say.

But deer eat lichen.

"They eat grass too." 

City-heeled boots clicking.

Woodcock at dusk and deer at dawn.

Coill takes on another meaning.

In bracken woods I meet him stalking.

Conifers climb to a white sun setting.

"Good evening, " I say and move on.

I hasten back to the Hill pub and you

pulling pints and casually knocking

sentiment out of city-slick.

Copyright with Cathy Leonard 2016

The Master of Ceremonies

As a child I was petrified by the ubiquitous town comedian who compered every show in town.
Years later I came across him again..
They are the subversives, the satirists,the truth sayers..Shakespeare's fools...
Good reason to be fearful....

Comedians still terrify me....

Birdie

He frightened me.
The little stand-up comedian
with the dead-pan face.

I never knew if he meant what he said.
And he might just burst out laughing
at my expense
at any moment.

And so I dreamt I killed him
Chopped him up
and buried him in my back garden

Only my parents knew
And they wouldn't tell.

Then I woke up
Telling myself over and over
That Birdie had come a long way since then
That Birdie was playing Beckett at the Gate.

Copyright with Cathy Leonard 2016

The Quare Fellow

Here is another poem written after the recent loss of a much loved friend.

We grew up next door to each other and travelled those early years on the same path.

Such friends become part of us.

And when they pass the memories bring us closer to ourselves.

The Quare fellow

for Ethna

Your fingers splayed to a full octave

you swing your accordion through a half-

figure of bellow, opening and closing,

gather it in close to your chest;

its huge bulk snug in your hands.

Our play Donal Cam,balloon hunchbacked Donal.

Your role to stick a pin in it,

and he’d walk tall again.

You stuck pins in everything;

egos, balloons, ceremony and pomp.

Pranks were your special subject.

A donation for colour TVs for the blind, Missus?

That cracked you up.

“Expelled for what?

Wasn’t it the altar boys that chased me?”

Crouched low behind moving haystack

sprung like a whippet out of the blocks on the last bend

scattering hay sheaf and disbelief in your wake

beating her by a length in the cross-country final.

Result pending enquiry.

And when the chalk fell in my lap

and we both spent the rest of the class on our knees

wasn’t it the quare craic.

And didn’t I stop

being a square, for one whole day.

Copyright with Cathy Leonard 2015

First Poem

I found my first poem in a heap of sheaves allocated to dust. 

I was brought up, like many of you, with no official play areas, so we improvised.

The street was our play-park and incursions into neighbours' back yards our thrill. 

It was also Northern Ireland in the early sixties 

so all that was about to spill onto the same streets 

was beginning to emerge.

Rumours

Tumbling over the bars

Backwards-forwards

Sidetricks-scandals

Knickers in the air

Nobody watching

Tennis on the footpath

No nets -no lines

Few rules-just balls

Always landing 

in Mrs Quinn's garden

The delight of foraging 

through Toner's backyard

Rumours extending

like a ripple from the rear

of adults alerted

And rumours of The Boys

Braving the Tricolour

Shouts of freedom

Heading for Coalisland

Followed by silence.

Copyright with Cathy Leonard 2016

To a Photographer

For me it always helps to write a poem when I suffer the loss of a loved one
So here is one of these poems.

To a Photographer

Wuthering heights etched in black charcoal.
You wanted to paint it
to your own kaleidoscope of colour
dispelling all the gloom of love betrayed
and vengeance raging.

You carefully placed your frame
with your back to the window.
And so we have it -
You reflected in the painting
Your shadow, like an angel, stretched
in the taking of it.

Almost a year now since your passing
leaving us "with our arms the one length,"
as you would say.
Paint peeling on window frames and doors.
Hooks fallen from their appointed places.
Our lives frayed edges we can't mend.
Zips that don't meet, buttons unstrung.

And you no longer there to fasten them.


Copyright with Cathy Leonard 2001

Saturday Matinee

Against my usual grain, I headed for the city on Saturday and ambled towards the Irish film Institute. The choice was between a Japanese film, Hirokazu Koreeda's adaptation of Akimi Yoshida's Umimachi Diary, Our Little Sister, or yet another Divine Comedy which, according to Tara Brady of the Irish Times, "Ought to be too daft and random for its own good."

I decided that it probably was
And opted for the "idyllic cricket serenaded beach town" of Kamakura, on the outskirts of Tokyo where I was enchanted by the rituals, scenery and culture of the Kouda sisters who welcomed their recently orphaned half sister to their delightful secluded home, replete with plum trees and a stock of plum wine.

Here a drama unfolds. But the beauty in the film for me was its understatement.
Emotions are deep and the undercurrent of feeling is powerful but the public airing of angst, to which we are accustomed, was refreshingly absent.

As a culture we tend to value all out expression, soul baring at any cost and ad nauseam...
I am personally culpable ...
So this mode of behaviour,, restraint, respect, but not repression, was thought provoking.

I enjoyed too the meal-time rituals, the festival, the one carriage locomotive, the white bait on toast and, of course, the plum wine.

Catch it if you can.

www.irishfilminstitute

TwentySomethings

Dreams are a useful, if bizarre source of inspiration....if you can remember them....

TWENTYSOMETHINGS…

 I dream that my two twenty-somethings have at last moved out.

They’re living in an elongated building- prefab-type- hut, the type used for school classrooms when there’s no money to build a school. He lives in blissful chaos at one end of it and she in fear of fire at the other.

 I explain to her that fire alarms usually work if you check the battery from time to time and to catch herself on and to start living her life. Then I go to tell him to mind her.

 His hair is shoulder length and he looks hung-over and all of his friends appear to have moved in with him. Asking him to mind her! How  ****  up have things become?

And I return home to find that our house has rooms we never knew we had.

And what else do I find but an infant growing faster than you can say Jack Robin

or Rabbit or whatever it is. It can even pull its sleeves right –side- out

and it’s talking to Stevie in no time at all, saying, “Gimme a break Da!”

And suddenly there’s another infant; I’m dropping them like hotcakes. And baby one catches baby two when I actually do drop it; our twenty-somethings

were never that fast or that smart.

But don’t babies in dreams always mean something else? And in my case creative endeavours wasting away in an attic or basement or outhouse, me not knowing they even existed?

At least these two are fast growers and fast talkers.

I waken up and my twenty-somethings are still here- he in the attic conversion and she in the garage one.

And to tell you the truth

it’s a bit of a relief…..

Copyright with Cathy Leonard 2016

Pink Gingham

Pink Gingham

She was a daughter of Eve

Sacred vessel

Arbiter of men’s fate.

She was to keep her hemline low and her lips pursed tight.

Girls were expelled for attending dance halls-

The Spanish inquisition could have learnt a thing or two

From the Mercy nuns-

And then the Sex Education-

How far should you let him go? Was a kiss sex? Or a hug?

A button undone? A bodice too low?-

On Radio Caroline the Bee Gees, The Stones and The Beatles

Women were burning bras all over America -

And she as forbidden to dance.

The arrival of the summer uniform

Pink gingham that lasted one term

Then back to the pinafore box pleats -

Pink gingham deemed an enticement to sin

And there were Homes for girls like that….

Copyright with Cathy leonard 2016

A Prayer

Let me be wind in your ear

loosening voice out of clipped tongue
Or rain sprouting within you
image where there was none
Or swans-down to which you fall
into songs that are sung.

Let me shed blessings on your Spring
And like the moon to the wave
Let me draw you in
And let you be my sun.


Copyright with Cathy Leonard 2016

On Becoming Picasso

A SEMI-BIOGRAPHICAL ACCOUNT OF MY PAINTING EFFORTS

ON BECOMING PICASSO

“And a can of hair spray,” I tell the girl with the earphones dangling from her earlobes. 

“It’s for my art class," I add.

 The queue in the shop is building up behind me, but I explain anyway. “To keep the pastels from running into one another.”

 The minute I get home I soak my morning’s effort in a blast of hair spray and stick it on the fridge door. I have already spent a fortune on my Thursday art class and the feedback so far has been a series of warm condolences.

“It’s not bad,” my youngest son reassures me.

“You have to start somewhere,” declares my eldest as she turns my masterpiece upside down in an attempt to decipher it.

 “It is a beginner’s class, love,” says my husband. “You can’t expect to be a Picasso just yet!”

     

But that’s just the problem. 

It isn’t a beginner’s class. 

The beginner’s class was full.

  

“Of course, as I’ve said before, there’s no such thing as white,” announces Vivienne Lensky on our first morning. “White does not exist. If you look with a painterly eye you’ll see that white is actually informed by some other colour, like blue or yellow.”

     

The other six painterly ladies nod knowingly. 

This isn’t their first outing in art class.

They’ve been juggling it with golf, bridge and church coffee mornings for well near a decade. Janet has already progressed to watercolours and spends most of the morning blow drying her elaborately detailed landscape. Josephine has taken up her vibrantly colourful market scene again, after abandoning it over the summer months. Perfectly curved and textured melons and peppers stare up at me from her market stall backdrop.

    

They are all discussing framing, art exhibitions, reasonable price tags to place on their term’s work etc etc while I am set to the task of choosing my favourite pictures from a pile of gallery brochures. “Just to determine your style,” says Vivienne.

“Pastels,” she announces after a cursory glance at my choice and I am assigned a box of chalks. 

Tears are beginning to smart. I had expected a palette and an array of exotic sounding colours to choose from. I had bought a bag of silver tubes and a selection of brush sizes from 2 to 16. They peep out now from my large canvas bag, also purchased for its width, depth and capacity to hold the thinners, the turpentine, the vast stock of supplementary objects that a real painter would require. 

But chalk? I have always hated the smell of it.

Within ten minutes I have smudges of chalk everywhere. The desk, my pale blue shirt, my nose. Vivienne offers a rubber which I use generously to rearrange my sleeping cat figure. But it is all a frantic explosion of dust and smudge. Red has ended up where it was not intended and my tortoiseshell is more ginger than tortoise. 

Meanwhile the other painterly ladies dabble elegantly and stroll from pale canvas to pale canvas admiring the view and talking of texture and perspective until the tears threaten to wash away my morning’s effort.

“I like his pose,” announces Janet looking over my shoulder.

“It’s a cat is it?” says Josephine.

“What else,” I mutter through gritted teeth.

“I think he’s splendid,” declares Vivienne and I want him for the Christmas card set.”

“The what?” I ask.

“The Christmas card designs. Every year we do a set of twelve for the Swahili Tiger Widows. Do you think you could try a snowman next week?”

 I have at last found my level. Three reindeers, four robins, two Santas, three snowmen and one tortoiseshell later and the Thursday morning Redford Painters have put together a set of Charity cards. The Tiger Widows declare a bumper year for revenue from Christmas card sales and I can’t wait until Spring. It seems I am about to embark on another mission that will require a detailed study of tulips, spring chickens, lambs and Easter bunnies. 

And everybody else is too busy creating masterpieces.

Copyright with Cathy Leonard 2016

Spider Web

Still on the subject...


SPIDER WEB

I am the cleaner.
I undo your knit and purl,dismantle
your filigree patterns stretched
taut across my window frames and ceiling
Almost invisible to the eye, even to mine
schooled to the purpose.

Having wiped you out yesterday
Today I return to your midnight carnage
Your  tell tale white droppings
What remains of your victims
Disembowelled outer shells
Prostrate beneath your shimmering spiral.
Intricate,delicate, pulsating, beautiful, deadly.

Copyright with Cathy Leonard 2016

A kitchen visitor

Today a spider poem!

A KITCHEN VISITOR

Like Tom Cruise suspended in Mission Impossible
a spider on a trail of smoke
hangs from my kitchen light bulb.

On his back, his limbs like needles
he knits and purls and slips and loops,
then throws out skein.
Suddenly he reins in and pulls
and draws  and gathers into himself
a ball of filigree silver.Then scampers
up vertical slope.

Rock climber, sky diver, silk spinner, weave maker.
I think you must have seen me watching...

Copyright with Cathy Leonard 2016

Woks and stuff

DON'T YOU JUST LOVE MISUNDERSTANDINGS...!!!

ANOTHER PIECE OF FLASH.

DEUH………

 Destiny.Mid calls.

 I love my new ring tone and let it play.

 Caller not in my address book.

 Finally. Reluctantly. I answer.

   “Hi, Jane. It’s Mark. You know, Sarah’s friend?”

   (I don’t, but I think he’s the dork who shadows Sarah’s every move.)

 “Oh, hi, yeh, course, Mark. How are you?”

   “Great, thanks. I’m sure you’re wondering why I’m calling?”

(Put me out of my misery, Mark. Fingers crossed this isn’t about a date. Will kill Sarah.)

   “It’s just that Sarah told me you just got one of those Japanese yokes, and I was  thinking of buying one too. But they’re a bit expensive, so I thought I’d do some research.”

(Research? It only cost about a tenner. Was right about him. Dork!)

 “Oh I get it! A review.Yeh. It’s great.Worth every cent.”

  “ Easily assembled?”

   (!!!!!) “It usually comes assembled, Mark.”

  “ Cool! User friendly?”

   (Is he ticking boxes?)

 “Very. Simple. No snags at all. And adaptable.”

   “Adaptable? Really?”

   ( No box for adaptable.)

“Well, versatile. You can put anything in it.”

 (Like vegetables, chicken, stir fry, fish….food, Mark, food.)

   “You use it for storage???”

   “Storage? Well, actually, now that you mention it. I could. Never thought of that though.”

 (Who the hell stores anything in a wok?)

   “I heard that they’re hard?”

   (Well deuh!!)

 “Very hard.”

   “Isn’t that a problem?”

   “I wouldn’t fancy if it buckled under pressure.”

(You know from heat,Mark, heat!) “Would you?”

   “Oh, I get you!”

   (Deuh)

 “Go for it, Mark!” (Be reckless.)

  “Doesn’t it take up a lot of space?”

   (He’s got to be kidding!)

 “ Space, no! You can fit it in anywhere.”

    “Sounds cool. I suppose you’ve taken up eating Japanese?”

   “Goes with the territory.”

   “Cool! How much did it cost, Jane, if you don’t mind me asking?”

   “Can’t remember. But Lidl sometimes do them. Or try Tescos.”

   “You bought it in Lidl???”

   “ Actually Aldi.You can buy up market if you like, Mark. But twenty euro max is enough to pay.”

   “Twenty euro for a futon?”

   " Who’s talking about futons? I thought you meant a wok!"

   "A wok? But they're Chinese Jane! Deuh!"

Copyright with Cathy Leonard 2016

   

Aftermath

Another piece of flash fiction. This one was published in the Fish Anthology 2013.

For details of the Fish Competitions, courses etc see link

http://www.fishpublishing.com/

AFTERMATH

I  never knew for sure what woke me. The sound of car tyres screeching towards Coalisland or the pick pock of pebbles thrown at a window? A hand gripped my chest. My own. And coexistent with the hand and the pebbles and the screech, a silence as of snow; a blanket of it thrown over the street. And through the silence and the sound of receding, spluttering exhaust pipe I sensed the presence of aftermath.

I threw back the woollen blanket and slipped my bare feet onto the vinyl floor. Foot soles arched. Pit pat towards the bedroom window, elbows cupping hunched shoulders. My finger on the venetian blind that clicked as it dipped and shaped itself into an eye.

Outside on the street someone lay slumped over the steering wheel of an Austin Cambridge; his head was bowed as if in prayer. The car horn wasn’t blaring; it should have been. Below me our next- door neighbour Wee Johnny, was stepping over his gate; not taking time to open it.

Pebbles. Tyres screeching. A figure slumped over a steering wheel. A car askew. And silence; but not the silence of snow.

I didn’t see Wee Johnny open the car door and release the body of Andrew Kirk from his bowed embrace.

When I opened the front door I saw him standing in the ragged gap in the hedge that separated our row of houses from the street, where others like me were hovering on door sills. Silence engulfed everything as we watched his arms, raised and flapping, telling us to back off.

Then someone turned up the volume and the waving arms told their story. The pebbles thrown had been gun shots. Andrew Kirk lay riddled in them. And the Troubles weren’t about to end anytime soon.

Copyright with Cathy Leonard 2016

The Way We Are

Still on the subject of bogs have a look at Niall Wright's paintings. 

See link  below

http://www.millcovegallery.com/wright.html

The Way We Are

This we take almost for granted:

The summer leaden Irish sky, green drumlin hills,

heathered, mossed and dry stone walled,

rivers forded by rock clumps and clumped reeds.

And somewhere in an album marked Early Years

I see you standing, lollipop in hand,

teetering on a rock mid-stream

your red hair blowing mid-current

your freckled skin awakening to the sun.

And I give thanks now that you have returned

from foreign climes and black-dyed tresses

and slick fake tan,to yourself -
Irish cailín, bog style and proud of it.

Copyright with Cathy Leonard 2016

Inspired by Niall Wright’s Oils on card

Raised Bog

We love the smell of turf and associate it with cultural tradition

But whether and  where to cut peat remains a much debated subject.

For the facts behind Raised and Blanket Bogs see link below.

http://www.ipcc.ie/a-to-z-peatlands/raised-bogs/

Raised Bog

My centre is not bottomless as you supposed.

And soon I will no longer surprise you

with my treasure trove, my black butter,

my bog men, my great Irish elk-

Your history and mine.

You will make walkways across what is left of me

as your Iron Age ancestors did

and teens tuned to i-pods will lark along my edges

once ten millennia deep, thick in iron rich ochre,

fished, reed choked, tree planted and engulfed.

I once rose high above my blanket bog neighbour

I was a bog- mossed dome then.

Now your mechanical diggers cleave 

and slice into hardpan and waterlog

to reach bedrock- that is mine.

Copyright with Cathy Leonard 2016

Baby Bootees

Shopping for a Christening present I came across a pair of bootees priced 18 euro and thought ...
I could do that myself.
This is the result.
Very cute.
Just hope they fit the baby!
Wool cost a euro, but to be fair it took me a couple of hours to turn these little heels.
There are mittens and hat to match but haven't stretched myself that far yet.

James Brett. JB008