Meet the Writer II

Winter 2004 Magazine
MEET THE WRITER

Poet Moya Cannon takes a second look at her poem, ‘Crow’s Nest’

This poem was written quite a number of years ago. I always like to take a long walk on St. Stephen’s Day. Christmas Day is such a family-centred, food-centred day that I feel the need to get right out and away on the following day. On this occasion I went for a walk on Horn Head, the westernmost peninsula on the north Donegal coastline, just north of the village of Dunfanaghy, where I was born and grew up. It has the distinction of being one of the windiest points in north-western Europe. With its five-hundred-foot cliffs falling down to the north Atlantic, it must also be one of the most beautiful. Near the centre of the headland there is a little rounded hill called Cnoc Sí, the Fairy Hill, and I decided to follow a path around it, a path that had all but disappeared under encroaching heather.

You often hear how, in the decades immediately before the famine, the population of Ireland was so high that people, particularly young couples, moved out onto marginal land – mountain and bog – land which needed to be worked and manured intensively to yield anything, land which was to be abandoned again as population decreased. The heathery ground through which I walked felt like that. I came to the shell of a roofless cottage, its sheds leaning up against it in the bright, low winter light. It was built in the shelter of a hill and it faced south. There was one other abandoned cottage behind it and some houses could be seen at a few miles distance. The front door opened onto two little fields, almost overgrown with bracken, with a stream running along the bottom of them. Beyond that lay the bog and behind that a range of mountains stretching across north-west Donegal from Muckish to Errigal. The combination of heart-shaking beauty and isolation reminded me of a story which an old neighbour of mine, who had come from near here, had told of a man from Horn Head who had lived near the cliffs and who had got married. Someone had unkindly remarked of him, “What kind of man is that, to bring a girl out to the place where the seagulls died of lone?”

I’ve spent a lot of time mooching around houses likes this, looking for what tangible evidence I can find of the complex of individual lives lived in them. Sometimes the fireplace and even the iron crane on which the pots and kettles had been hung are intact. Occasionally an old press tilts against the wall or lies flung open on the floor. Sometimes there is an iron bedstead in one of the bedrooms.

One of the most common finds used to be a ripped horse-collar or donkey-collar in the shed. I know I am trespassing on these occasions but hope that the trespass is cancelled out by a kind of tenderness I feel for the people who worked and played, who loved and quarrelled and prayed and ate and drank here. All of these objects are so ordinary and so intimate, having been touched hundreds of times by men, women and children long dead or gone, that they possess that quality of “duende” described by the Spanish poet Lorca – a kind of invisible resonance which old objects sometimes possess because of the lives which have brushed against them, which have imbued the objects with something of the spirit of the people who have physically touched them.

In front of this particular little house, growing in its shelter, there was an ash tree, which, like most of the trees which had managed to survive on Horn Head, had grown sideways rather than vertically. The wall and the house had between them granted it a certain amount of shelter and after that it grew over rather than up. It was a small bare tree with a huge nest in it. Sometimes something looks odd but you can’t initially figure out why. This solitary, low crow’s nest reminded me of when I first went to Inis Oirr in the Aran Islands and saw a field with one sheep in it. Not knowing a great deal about birds, I had always assumed that crows, like sheep, were very sociable, that all crows lived in large communities, in rookeries built in high trees. And yet here was this huge nest all on its own in the middle of a tree, which was so small that I could climb up onto the stone wall and look into it. I had already been thinking and wondering about the people who had built and lived in the house. Why and when did they build it? What were their names? Were they happy? Were they cranky? What were their troubles? Had children been born here? How many generations? Did they live in poverty or was there a degree of comfort and ease in their lives? Did people die here? A poem is sometimes an extended exercise in wondering. Now I started to wonder about what kind of unsociable crows had later built out here on their own, recklessly, it seemed to me, within reach of foxes, humans and other dangerous predators. It struck me that the building of the house and the nest had shared the same impetus, the need to mate, to reproduce, the instinct to care for the young. And I thought about the strangeness of it, that it wasn’t just an instinct for individual survival which had motivated the people who had built the house but sexual desire and, hopefully, love too – eros – the life force taking on and challenging all the harshness of the elements and building a shelter where it was possible to care for young life – just as the outwardly rough, untidy nest of that harsh-sounding bird, the crow, had incorporated into it soft things, sheep’s wool, a feather – evidence of care.

There was some kind of reassurance in this, some sort of tangible evidence that care and fate in life are integral to survival, that the building of shelter is basic to our being, that where there is shelter something always grows – even if it is only a crazy, wind-sculpted ash tree, with a grey crow’s nest, and that desire and love are bound up with the impulse to create shelter.

Reading the poem several years later, considerations of shelter also remind me of the way in which the philosopher John Moriarty suggests that our culture shelters us, that our songs, our art, our stories and our mythologies shelter us and allow us to live in out of the cold blast of meaninglessness.

Moya Cannon, November 2003
Moya Cannon’s poem ‘Crow’s Nest’ is from the list of prescribed poems for examination in 2005. The poem comes from Moya’s collection, Oar, (2000) published by The Gallery Press. For more information on Moya Cannon, visit the Gallery press website at www.gallerypress.com.

Crow’s Nest
On Saint Stephen’s day,
near the cliffs on Horn Head,
I came upon a house,
the roofbeams long since rotted into grass
and outside, a little higher than the lintels,
a crow’s nest in a dwarf tree.

A step up from the bog
into the crown of the ash,
the nest is a great tangled heart;
heather sinew, long blades of grass, wool
and a feather,
wound and wrought
with all the energy and art
that’s in a crow.

Did crows ever build so low before?
Were they deranged, the pair who nested here,
or the other pair who built the house behind the tree
or is there no place too poor or wild to support
if not life,
then love, which is the hope of it,
for who knows whether the young birds lived?