ANOTHER IRISH VISIT I wrote this poem in Ireland in the later months of WWII.
The exact site was a place called Bangor-By-the Sea. That would be Irish Sea over which we had come by ferry boat a day or so before – destroyer escorted, too, because the Nazis had tried to sink a ferry boat crossing from Stranraer, Scotland.
There was a swimming pool called “Pickie Pool” at roadside and just this past week a visitor at our house tells me the pool is still there. It's on a gentle slope leading up to a hill called a “mountain” to “Floral Hall”- a temple-like building housing the city's Horticultural Society exhibits at that time. From that vantage point we had an enviable view of the rugged, rocky coastline. With disturbing regularity, we saw wreckage of ocean going ships – mostly freighters and tankers, I would say...the cold, dark sea water beating endlessly. It was a there I wrote much of the following poem as my major piece of deja vu during the war time years.
EIRE REVISITED
I've had the feeling and so have you, no doubt
An uncertain teasing in your mind when traveling
that you've been on that very spot before, a gadabout
memory from some long-past peregrination unraveling.
I remember one such place and time back years ago.
It hit me in County Down, Belfast Laugh,Bangor-By-the-Sea.
“Floral Park , up past “Pickie Pool” atop a promontory with a row
of wave-racked freighters far area ...including one that used to be but was no more, just a relic, on the rocky shore.
She'd been hauling coal, I was told and a North Channel storm lifted her on the rack of rock and broke her back. The door
of the after cabin was still swinging crazily, I remember...a norm
of movement for the gyrating gulls. No sound, of course
metal being eaten away by slow, water-fed fire and due with waves still lapping at the stricken hulk as if they knew there was plenty of time, plenty of wreaks and many more staves of rusting metal being eaten away by slow, water-fed fire and due to crumble into near-nothingness; wash away to the down most rima unmapped on the ocean's floor; yesterday's pastured Valleys; a blue beginning for tomorrow's just-discovered jewel mine – a question mark to make a person wonder at what they see and seek the reason for how it came to be.
Could it be that north born knife bearers of long ago
chanced upon this place or even smashed upon these rocks, their cattle lowing in distress as they urged them from the deck and through the rocky barriers to shore to be the stock of present Nordic strains?.Or, could it have been a later one of us wandered from Lewis, Skye or Harris Isles and loved this scene so deeply that that I think of it today in a style of memories that tell me I have seen this place, this very shore -as some far-distant person - I have seen all before!
Except, of course, the freighter,
It came along much later.
That's my memory to hold
for a future seeker bold
Who visits Bangor, learns its lore
and says: “I'm certain I have known this place before!”
Andrew McCaskey amccsr@adelphia.net 12-10-06 [c563wds]
