Lignum Vitae

i.m. Matt Kiernan (1898-1986), pipe maker and piper

He fashioned chanters on a treadle lathe
from truncheons turned from the self-same timber
abandoned by the dwindling British Empire
in a pantry where you couldn’t swing a cat.

It was able to bring people to their senses.
Its strength and density were greatly esteemed.
Its relative softness compared to metal meant
it bruised more often than it cut the skin,

a quality, from his years on the beat,
of which none than Kiernan was more aware.
He’d heard Jem Byrne at the fair of Athboy
when he was a child and never forgot. 

His teapot in Cabra was never cold.
Over the meadows and Coolronan Bog
they piped him home with a chanter he made -
The Grouse in the Bog, The Jolly Tinker, The Stack of Wheat.

The Eleventh of October

for Grace, turning twenty

They were making the most of a couple
of dry days in the middle of the month
to get the two big fields behind us ploughed,
while we were sitting at the kitchen table
with no great plans to do anything much.

You were talking about the night, dancing,
your Uber driver saying to have a good time
and, every time the tractor came and turned
and went again, a squall of seagulls came,
the way they would at sea behind a trawler.

That’s all that happened. Soon it was over.
I think I took the dog to walk the strand.
And still, through the fruit trees, all I could see
was gulls, the stubble of summer turned under,
the eternal happening over your shoulder.