A CROOM woman, Clairr O’Connor is author of two novels, two stage plays and several poetry collections. Her short stories and poems have been anthologised widely, including Field Day’s. Radio plays have been heard from BBC 4 and Warswaw.
Her poem ‘Search’ pays a nod to Wordsworth’s ballad ‘Lucy Gray’*, its mystery pegged to a detective’s search in gritty mineral definition. For all the reference to texting and radio, words like ‘flint’, ‘ash’, ‘parchment’ to chords of a piano help link to loss immemorial, an untoward burial in far off fields.
As usual, our Poem for the Day is from Limerick City of Culture anthology, ‘City of Dreams’. This series will run until European Capital of Culture 2020 bid finality in Autumn.
Search
They searched the onion fields./ Found only bison bones./ There was talk of ingestion,/ digestion, but no one knew/ anything as far back as flint.
That time was hot as Vulcan’s fire/ White as ash. Inspector Lipscomb/ noted the end of optimism/ in her team but kept going./ Interviewed again,/ the centenarian who didn’t/ need spectacles said he was/ certain he saw the blonde child in the purple dress that night/ before ‘The Archers’ began./ Then he turned back to his piano.
Lipscomb dreamed:/ she was driftwood,/ afloat to wherever/ the sea took her,/ bobbing ahead always/ the blonde child/ in the purple dress.
Days, nights, weeks- / she pushed herself,/ her team. Her husband/ took their own children to Tintagel on holiday,/ texted her comments/ on King Arthur and his knights.
When they dug up/ the blonde child/ from under the edge/ of the last onion field/ there was no colour./ It had been raining/ heavily for days./ She was a mud child/ with the bulging eyes/ of an oboe player – her/ parents’ faces tarnished parchments of grief.
* Wordsworth wrote:
“Written at Goslar in Germany. It was founded on a circumstance told me by my Sister, of a little girl who, not far from Halifax in Yorkshire, was bewildered in a snow-storm. Her footsteps were traced by her parents to the middle of the lock of a canal, and no other vestige of her, backward or forward, could be traced. The body however was found in the canal.
“The way in which the incident was treated and the spiritualising of the character might furnish hints for contrasting the imaginative influences which I have endeavoured to throw over common life with Crabbe’s matter of fact style of treating subjects of the same kind. This is not spoken to his disparagement, far from it, but to direct the attention of thoughtful readers, into whose hands these notes may fall, to a comparison that may both enlarge the circle of their sensibilities, and tend to produce in them a catholic judgment”.
