Live Encounters Poetry & Writing January 2025
We and Our Bitterness, poem by Richard W Halperin.
We and Our Bitterness
‘We and our bitterness have left no traces
On Munster grass and Connemara skies.’
– W.B. Yeats
Very young Yeats wrote that. In his late plays –
The King of the Great Clock Tower, Purgatory –
bitterness entertains. With gestures and ritualised
murders. With words, which Yeats tells the actors
to make inaudible if they feel like it, because words
deceive but motion doesn’t. All of Yeats’s
political poems are bitter. All of his political speeches
are bitter, he was not a Senator for nothing.
Do we and our bitterness leave traces? I think so.
Do we and our wars leave traces? I think so.
Grass remembers. Skies remember. Stones
remember. Children remember, before the history
they are taught gets prettied up or censored,
along with books in libraries and the names of libraries.
Artists remember. In Wilfred Owen’s poem
‘Strange Meeting,’ one of the two killed soldiers
who face each other in a dark tunnel says to the other,
who killed him, that sunk even deeper into
the earth than remembered violence, are wells
of sweet water, which can wash the clotted blood
clean. Britten puts the poem in his War Requiem.
Most requiems – I have just re-heard Mozart’s –
include an ‘Agnus Dei.’ There is something
to be said for asking a lamb for mercy.
© Richard W Halperin
Richard W. Halperin’s is a U.S.-Irish dual national living in Paris. His collections are published by Salmon (four to date since 2010) and Lapwing (18 to date since 2014). Early in 2025, Salmon will bring out Selected & New Poems, Introduction by Joseph Woods, drawing upon these collections and including thirty new poems. Mr Halperin’s work is part of University College Dublin’s Irish Poetry Reading Archive. He reads frequently in Ireland; his most recent reading (on YouTube now) was at the Heinrich Böll Memorial Weekend, Achill, Co. Mayo, last May.
Moving and apposite Richard. Bravo!