Controversy
Not looking for Controversy, I found it
four miles from where I grew up, as the crow flies.
Controversy (Talamh an Chlampair)
staring back at me from my iPad screen,
a place I had not known existed but Google knew.
Its all-seeing eye identified Controversy
as a townland in the County of Tipperary,
in the Barony of Owney and Arra,
in the civil parish of Killoscully,
an irregular pentagon, a 30-hectare patch of ground.
Farneigh to the west of it,
Garraun to the North,
Munnia to the east of it,
Gortshane to the south.
No trace of settlement in Controversy
though a road runs through it.
The National Census had no truck with it.
Griffith’s Valuation took no heed of it.
Not a soul, it seems, courted Controversy,
was mired in Controversy or tainted by it.
Controversy excited no interest good nor bad,
controversial only in name.
Our Mother’s People
Think of your mother’s people! my father’s words
urging us to work harder, to apply ourselves more earnestly
to some laborious task like forking hay or barrowing turf.
He might have said, Get stuck in! or Put your backs into it!
but he didn’t. Nor did we reflect on our mother’s relations
in Aughrim or Whitegate or Tobernagat, any more than
we spared a thought for our Durack antecedents in Moynoe.
Pre-teen, pre-ballrooms and pre-girls, we had hurling
on our minds and Sunday matinees in McCormack’s Picture Hall.
My father was old school, didn’t tolerate slackers.
He was a stern taskmaster but not all of the time.
I still recall the smile upon his face when he exhorted us
to think of our mother’s people.
Echoes from Touknockane
Unforgiving of nettles for their painful kiss,
of thistles for their prickliness,
ragwort for their noxious scent
and docks for their subterranean rat-tailed roots
(although their leaves could heal a nettle-sting)
we took the scythe to all of them
on Touknockane’s slopes and plateau.
Not like mowing hay or corn,
those weeds offered varying forms of resistance
and played contrasting tunes upon the chine,
from swish and rustle to crunch and pluck
We filed the blade to a keen edge
which we renewed with swipes of a whetstone.
A limestone cliff took up the sound,
sent the rasping clack-ack-ack reechoing
like the cry of a demented corncrake grating
from the quarry’s northern face
Michael’s latest poetry collection, This Deluge of Words (2023), was published by Revival Press and is available here.
Learn more about Michael on our Contributors’ Page
(Photo: Bernd Thaller/ flickr.com/ CC BY-ND 2.0)
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