Jerm Curtin

            A time will come when every poem I write

            will be as ingrained as checking a watch,

            kneeling or making the sign of the cross.

            Faith will not matter, nor authenticity.

            I will come to my page like a blackbird

            to its branch, repeating the lessons I've learned:

            something to do with age, and with routine,

            and a grandmother opening her arms to a child.

            Years hence, standing above the sinkhole

            or the stairwell where a child’s look was lost,

            miles from the delicate arms at rest

            on a banister or a low windlass wall,

            I remember the silence on the sunny porch

            like a poetry lesson as she nurtured

            life from the dew in the shadow of the cacti.  

            It was a feeling as old as the soft blue hills;

            the lichened orchard, past its prime, ripened

            with marvels and moss, like a backdrop to Paradise.

            Now, as I cross a thoroughfare, hand in hand

            with a lover, or run my fingers down an arm

            in the dark as if it were the railing on a deck,

            and other fingers return the caress,

            or as I hear the nightingales among the reeds,

            it is that first heaven I'm reminded of.

            How she lingered out on the porch, tending

            to cacti and potted flowers. How I knew

            I mustn't disturb her. Later she'll bring out

            her currant bread and Lucozade, a caraway-seed loaf.

            Meanwhile, I try to keep occupied.

            I find the mood has penetrated everywhere.

            In a dusty outhouse loft, I come across

            damaged and dated toys, school jotters,

            rusty tools and gadgets, fabulous tarnished fishing flies,

            American letters stashed in a box,

            red, white and blue around the borders,

            solemn statesmen on the stamps.

            I follow my grandmother, tall and thin, her hair

            like ermine, back through O. Henry to New York.

            Her face flashes out above the crowd.

            The Depression brought her home, in ways

            I am too young to know. When I am older,

            I'll remember; another bauble

            to occupy my time, but nothing on which to rely;

            I catch a sense of intangible doom –

            as in a fairytale, where no disguise will free

            a victim from a lure, or return a wanderer

            to their course, as if old age had built a wall

            about its house and time itself had stalled

            and drawn to it a child who knows they must not enter.

            But once I turned the key on that outhouse door,

            a century might well have passed before

            my grandmother called me from the parlour,

            her tête-à-tête with the cacti over.

            And almost as long before I'd read

            a poem about a hapless monk in an orchard.

            A worthless monk, beaten round the ears,

            whose beard cannot hide his sores,

            one the others can't abide,

            so he is sent to dig and till the soil,

            and while he works and weeds,

            he asks the Blessed Virgin for a glimpse

            of what's in store for those who enter Paradise.

            He prays among the seedlings in his care,

            under trees whose nuts will be their staple

            through the winter, and fruit trees,

            whose flowers he loves and worries through frost.

            He works and hears a blackbird sing. Or is it a thrush?

            His ear is poor, but the song is beautiful;

            he spends the afternoon in its thrall

            until the time to gather tools and join

            the other monks for Vespers. Wistfully,

            he hoists the hems of his tunic up.

            In evening light that bathes the path,

            some shrubs are now as large as trees,

            there are others he can't recognise;

            but it meanders as it always does,

            and takes him as far as the chapel.

            Bells ring. He steps inside, and genuflects.

            He makes the sign of the cross before the Eucharist.

            And finds himself beside a brother

            who he does not know, and whispers:

            'Who are you? And which monks are these?'

            After the first outbreaks of plague had passed,

            the last monk of the old school came in from the garden,

            in aspect rough, speaking a dialect

            we barely comprehended. He asked for brethren

            we knew nothing of, so we first beat him

            with a stick and bade him talk sense.

            Then, contrite at our behaviour, we washed

            and fed him like a stray, showed him to a cell

            and allowed him rest.

            Next day we garnered from his nonsense, hobbled

            in that old tongue, that he referred

            to monks now long deceased, and a prayer

            to the Virgin Mother in which he'd asked to savour

            Paradise, whereupon a bird had sung.

            We calculate its trill went on three hundred years.

            Such is the miracle of prayer: a simple monk

            in a garden granted a glimpse of Paradise,

            while we hung on his words, and mourned its loss.