Live Encounters Poetry & Writing August 2024
The Beauty of Happening, guest editorial by Geraldine Mills.
When the Light: New and Selected Poems (Arlen House, 2023). Available at: Amazon.com
I read about the man who left England and settled on the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland. Something about its miles of stone walls held him there. The cartographer in him had him walking it day after day, every step a purpose, as he charted each field, named each boreen, mapping each ancient physical feature, its topography, and in that way, preserved the islands’ heritage.
Here, in the west of Ireland where I have lived for nearly 30 years, I ask myself how well do I know the geography of my own place? I’m not talking of the roads of the local townlands but the world within the stone walls that we call home. While everyone is walking the Camino de Compostela, stepping out across the Meseta in the long hours under the sun, I cannot go and learn about somewhere else if I am not familiar with every tree and rock that is around me, to be able to read this land before I ever turn the page of elsewhere.
Because of that, I have taken to walking the camino of the field at the back of our house, to record the atlas of my own life. Like T.S Eliot, I hope that the end of all my exploring will be to arrive where I started and know the place for the first time.
When we moved into our house, the farmer had kept the wall clean of shrub or tree but with no encouragement from us trees have planted themselves there. A seed listened, heard the sound of life tapping inside it. It read the light through the soil, the temperature the soil gave back to itself, found the shelter of the stones, put down root, shoots stretching into the air. And so the trees grew.
I begin to move around the walls and start to record the names of the trees growing there while the field lifts itself up to me. A realisation begins to dawn. As I begin to record alder, willow, hazel and ash I recognise these as some of our native trees that go to make up the Celtic Tree calendar of 13 months with 28 days as constructed by Robert Graves. This calendar is associated with ogham, that mysterious alphabet of the ancient Irish and British Celtic peoples. Ogham script is made up of a series of lines carved along a central line. These sets of lines denote the initials associated with each tree which the calendar uses.
Now that I can incorporate this piece of our land into the ogham calendar, I start at the west-north-west corner where the dry-stone wall meets the farmer’s field and our neighbour’s boundary. The first to be recorded is the willow. It is given the initial S for Saille in the tree calendar. Commonly known as Sally, its rods are still used to make baskets. Three willows that seeded themselves here are now commanding a canopy across the grass. In spring their catkins fall in a pollen shower all over the field, sprout in no time, little seedlings that find whatever hold they can.
Alongside them is the alder, as noted by F for Fearn and is a lover of wet places, the roots drink up all the west of Ireland rain and thrive on it. In ancient times, its wood was sturdy enough to be fashioned into round shields.
Holly as noted by T for Tinne is plentiful along this wall too, with its bottle green waxy leaves, its spikey curves, its carmine red berries. Unlike all the other trees, it hangs onto its leaves until June when it drops them, their fall, a carpet of noisy brown sharpness at my feet.
The hazel or Coll is the next one to have rooted against that part of the wall close to where the sun goes down. I am no Julian of Norwich, but the hazel also holds its whole own world for me, the tree closest to my heart. The one of my childhood; there was a hazel grove behind our home where I ran to when the walls of the house could not contain me. My entire universe held in that small nut.
I stash its bounty away in my pockets, in the corners of my bag, on the windowsills. They are my talisman, my rune, the one whose myths I carry around with me, of Fionn and the salmon or wandering Aengus in the hazel grove, Hermes and his wand. They become a poem.
The lung tree is the name we have given to the huge ash that has grown healthily along the southwest corner of the wall. We call it that because it is made up of two huge lobes of leaf-like lungs that branch out into bronchioles and alveoli. On days when the world is too heavy for me to breathe, I look to it to do it for me. Once considered a charm against drowning, twigs of it were carried by emigrants to the US after the famine and it is famous for the wood that makes hurleys. A noble tree throughout Ireland, it carries the symbol N for Nion in the tree calendar. Yet many of them are suffering. The fungus, Ash Dieback brought onto the island some years ago, causes the loss of leaves and death of the crown. Lots of our younger trees have succumbed to it.
We pray that our lung tree is strong enough to withstand it. Because the ash doesn’t give up hope. It sends its keys, its single winged seeds floating all over the field, landing on the gravel, in pots, any unlikely place it may find a hold. I see the seedlings sprouting. I trust some of them will survive while the snow of dandelion seed drifts across the air to land where it will and wait its time among the tiny suns of buttercups.
In the south corner more alder dance with light in the evenings as the sun goes down behind the lung tree. This wall is graced by it. Language doesn’t have the words to paint the light that gives the wall its own importance.
After the gather of these alder, we have the hawthorn with its symbol U, Uath which in the month of May dresses its whole self in white blossom. Its flower, its twigs, its berries nurture the heart just to look at them. When the countryside is ablaze with white, we should be celebrating it with a festival as the Japanese Hanami honours its own cherry blossom. How I wish I knew what the sky sang as it brightened with all this flowering.
When all else fails, we welcome haws as do our migratory birds that come in October all the way from Scandinavia, the eye of the redwing telling us it is not a thrush as does the little flame on the wing that they are called by. They turn their feathers to the morning sun. singing to the first sky. If they haven’t glutted on all the berries, I make haw chutney. Making this preserve carries the same labour as writing a poem. Gathering as much fruit as I would words, drop all fruit and images into a big pot and boil them all up with the tart of vinegar, the wages of salt. Add clove, ginger and nutmeg, the taste of metaphors and let the whole lot simmer for a while. Then when the time comes, pass the mulch through the sieve of my red pen until I am left with a fraction of what I started out with. Pot up into jars and leave for months to mellow, to become itself, a poem.
Where the wall has no trees, ivy and brambles twin their way up along the stones, sheltering, covering. Both of these, with their symbols M and G, are included in Graves calendar. Ivy, the nesting place of the wren. Cheeky little troglodyte, tail perched, peeks out from behind a stone, and on short, rounded wings whirls to flight in search of breakfast. She has mouths to feed and her mornings are a panic of caterpillar catching. Another few days and they will be ready for their first flight. No one sees the nest secreted within the crevice of the wall behind the veil of ivy.
The elder has grown huge all by itself. With its symbol R or Ruis, it was sown as part of native hedging but the blossom was so beautiful it was let grow to full height and it’s a larder for the pigeons who gorge there. The elder also has superstitions attached to it. With its scaly trunk and centre of soft white pith, it’s supposed to have been the tree from which the true cross was made, the tree on which Judas hung himself. But its blossom is beautiful and plentiful and captures summer in its elderflower cordial.
We also have the rowan, the birch, and the reeds with their consonants, B, L and Ng respectively which all go to make up Robert Graves’ ancient calendar. Now there is just one more to make up the full list. Some bird must have dropped an acorn against this wall for there the sessile oak has seeded itself and has grown large and strong without us giving it a thought. D or Duir, is our doorway to other worlds with its gifts of endurance and triumph. The tree of the Dagda, the tree of the druids, king of trees and tree of kings.
This tree also bears oak galls, nut-brown spherical homes which are the nursery of the minute gall wasp that is so tiny it needs magnification to see it. I am reminded that the monks made ink from galls such as these in order to write our ancient manuscripts like the Fadden More psalter. I try to imagine what it was like for the monk in his cold little scriptorium having to first make the ink before any word of the psalms marked the vellum.
Fascinated by the idea, I go searching out a recipe to make it. Visible on the branches I pluck a dozen of these brown galls. Placing them in my mortar I grind them to a fine dust with the pestle. Mixing this with the measured amount of water, I follow instructions and leave for two weeks to let the alchemy happen.
After this time, I add Iron Sulphite, the gum Arabic to fix the ink, strain it through muslin into a jar. Then in the scriptorium of my kitchen I pick up the pen, snug in my hand, dip it in the sloe-black ink that has magically appeared. Like the best of live encounters, I begin to write about my own place in the beauty of happening.
© Geraldine Mills
Geraldine Mills is a poet and fiction writer. She has published five collections of poetry, three of short stories and two children’s novels. She is an experienced facilitator and is a member of Poetry Ireland’s Writers in Schools’ Scheme. Her most recent publication is When the Light: New and Selected Poems (Arlen House, 2023).