Peatstack

The Peatstack has been banging his drum for a few weeks now on the issue of school closures, and so something a little lighter, but don't worry, The Peatstack has been digging around inside the issue of education and the PPP and will have something new in a day or two.

In the meantime...The Peatstack has celebrated his own personal Hogmannay, with the bringing home of the peats. This is my favourite time of the year, when you know its done and the peats are home, it has a real year-end feel to it, a time to relax a little, perhaps, and stop looking out the window every spare moment and wondering if its a good time to go to the moor. But sadness also (the helpless romantic in me, maybe talking here), that I say goodbye to the moor for a few months. Maybe that's a goodbye to a type of freedom that can only be experienced by total immersion in solitude, the sounds and light of the big place, the distant call of the birds, and even, when the winds in the right direction, the sound of the sea from both sides of the island - and it would be good to compile a list of all the places on the Long Isle where it is possible to hear the sea from both sides, east and west at the same time. Maybe the joy of the moor is that feeling of being small, being just another living thing in a massive scheme, made of the same stuff.
And the spare time can be put to other work. I have been working on a kind of Moorland Notebook, jottings, poems, little stories that come to mind as I work away out there and afterwards, at home. I must confess to spending a lot of time when on the moor supposedly working, doing absolutely nothing but standing, leaning on the bank or sitting on that obstinate white rock that has become like a summer twin so well do we know each other now, just peering out over the open space or looking at the sky, or holding some daft debate in my head that won't clear from my thoughts. This time grows often from a break for a mug of tea from that other twin of mine, the battered flask. I highly recommend it, spend time in the open doing nothing but thinking.
So, very nervous about this, but here's the lastest entry in the Moorland Notebook, a poem to my pal, the plover.

Plover

Plover,
wandering
like a banished monk
on the moor,
show me
what you see
from your tummock,

tell me
what you hear
at night
in the screaming
darkness

so that I can learn
from the bog.

I envy you running
bare-footed
beyond the road end
and your low, sure flight
by the river bend,

but do you know your
belly's black?
And why do you not fly
to a hot, dry land
to raise your young?

Why do you
not answer me
when I shout at you
untill my voice
has broken?


Then, in the quiet,
you ask me
why I live in a house
when the land is open
and the sky is as free
as burn water,
and why I will not be
your neighbour?

(c) The Peatstack 2007 (as if anyone else would want to claim it as their own!)

There's not only time for writing, but time for reading and here's a recomendation that came by surprise rooting through the secondhand books on some auction site or the other - the writing of Irishman, Sigerson Clifford. Clifford was, it seems, a Cork man of Kerry parentage born in 1913. He died many moons back and it seems has been very laregly forgotten this side of the Ring of Kerry.
The shortstories are in an old book called 'The Red Haired Woman and Other Stories', and there's a collection of poems called 'Ballads of a Bogman'.
A small exscerpt from the beginning of the story The Red-Haired Woman(I don't know if this is legal, its only a small quote and is for the good of Clifford GRHS, and gives a good taste of the quality and subject matter of this gentle, folk-lordy writer):
'All that morning the Fair Green had been a bedlam of lowing cattle, barking dogs and shouting men keeping their beasts herded together with whacking ashplants. Now it was empty save for the county council's unbroken stones in the centre, the tarred electric-light pole, with a circus poster wrapped around it, at the tope, and James Moylan with his bullock standing mournfully beside the school wall at the bottom.'
The writing is from some place that Clifford knew well, his own home patch and in the Brogue he spoke and heard everyday. The subjects are small moments of no great significance, the ballads about hard times and lost love but also the good times of a country childhood. It might not win the Booker Prize but it is real and seems to come from some kind of lost human place, maybe a bit like those moorlands.