Midlands Voodoo

On Monday morning Peter Sirr and Enda Wyley invited us to their cottage outside Strokestown for coffee; first and last decent cup I had in the place, so delightful in other respects.

Then we headed for Dublin. My cousin Pat was going to follow me in his car, but I pulled in after only 5 minutes and told him to go on ahead; too many things were snaring my eye, and the weather was that heady mix of slate grey raincloud and ecstatic sunbursts. I knew I'd have to take some shots.

Aproaching Longford I saw this doll (my blip photo) strapped to a pole. No idea why. I think the green t-shirt on the doll read 'Ruth', though I'm not certain. Could be something to do with the elections or sports (the other countrywide obsession). There were a few of these scary-looking figures on other telegraph poles in the vicinity. I didn't bother asking anyone their purpose, not enough time. Besides, it is more interesting not to know; the explanation could only disappoint.

The election posters were everywhere of course. I couldn't resist this one of Kelly (whoever he is). Could be a perfectly decent human being of course, but whoever stuck Jesus above him makes the man look downright sinister, as if horns are about to pop out of his forehead.

But the first candidate for a blip was this roadside shrine I'd noticed earlier. The light was perfect, though I had to risk getting the new camera spattered with rain. The statue is a miniature of the ubiquitous ones you can see in grottos all over the country.

I don't know if many recall, but back in the 1980s/90s Ireland went slightly off the rails with crowds seeing 'moving statues' everywhere. Driving through West Cork in 1994, I actually witnessed something weird myself, and would have dismissed it as a trick of the tree-filtered sunlight, but two others in the car saw it also, a small but unmistakably strange flickering. It didn't convert myself or my cousin (can't speak for the other guy as I haven't seen him since), but the incident stayed with me. So much so that I wrote a poem about it, which is appearing now in my second collection (one way of 'writing it off' I guess). I find it hard to credit a divine architect, and impossible to believe in one who delights in teasing us with glimpses through the peephole, and I think the ultra-right-wing Marian cult is especially ugly, kitsch really. But I saw what I saw, and I am pleased to have had some inexplicable fragment of the universe flashed at me. Anyway here's the poem:

COURTMACSHERRY
for T.P., who kept his eyes on the road

Slowing the car, he pointed to a mud-grey grotto
enclosing its off-white virgin, one of the ones
who had moved, apparently. We were almost past
when three of us caught it, a flicker in the middle finger
of her right hand, as if the video jammed or a frame
dithered for a bare half-second. Call it a half-wave,
curtains parted for just one palp of a wind
from nowhere: scarf of smoke off an unburnt bush.

As we reeled in more of the countryside she got rushed
into speed-frame hedges, afternoon's deepening groove.
Arriving, again, to salute a kink in the curtains,
here is my half-wave back: move over a bit,
make room in the dimness; hello twitch of the light.