GOD GRANT ME THE EYESIGHT TO TELL THE DIFFERENCE
Donal O'Donovan, 1928-2009
Well, its not going to be a long one, but it is my father’s fourteenth anniversary. 8th January 2009. I thought for years he’d died on 9th January because 9 was this number that wouldn’t go away in the family, he being 9 years older than my mother, his father (my grandfather) having been 9 years older than his mother (my grandmother), and a whole rake of other things to do with the number 9, such as also that he had AA meetings in Room no.9, (can’t say where of course), he gave up the booze when I was 9 (no, I was 8 actually) and well my black cat Nunu had 9 kittens over 2 litters but that might not count. And my father died 9 years after my mother. 9 is the number of completion, I’m told.
January is, obviously, in the hours of the year, the bleakest. But it was very bleak 14 years ago. At his wake, there was a great gathering of all sorts of writers, musicians and poets and regular AA folk, who may have thought of my father as a bit of an AA hero, as he was a great sponsor and he’d take calls from those who were going demented from the lack of drink and the demons that appeared to them, at any hour of the night. His best friend would appear occasionally, when trouble haunted him, with a bag of sandwiches and they’d spend hours talking about his challenging marriage. But they talked about many things, like what would happen to them after death. (T. was about 30 years younger than my father, but still this subject got a lot of airtime because it was one my father asked everyone close to him about. When I told him the Buddhist version, with the Bardo and the Rebirth scenario, he said ‘nonsense. it has to be better than that.’)
Does it seem like yesterday? No. The memory of a Winter Solstice in 2008, the day my mother promised to mind my little baby, it was a Friday I think, was to be my father’s last night in the house. The ambulance came and took him away and he slithered into private room, and lost the power of speech by a stroke and was gone in a few short weeks. I dreamed about him as I slept in a little pull-up bed the nurse brought in for us, as he went into the last days of passing away. I dreamed about a little Indian boy running down the street, with a golden Buddha behind him. That became the poem I read about Dad at his wake:
DEAR FATHER
The long day stretched out blue and
Clear for the larks to sing into,
As you pass by
I dream of a golden Buddha.
The lids fold over your eyes
The breath rushes out
With no suitcase
No tank to fill
No ticking watch
This time, you leave for some other world,
For some other place,
Your spectacles perched on the bridge of your nose
Your pen scratching across the dry page
Whispering:
“Listen to my poem”.
But I cannot hear it.
Dear father, until we meet again,
I will sit under the birch tree,
I will wait for the door of your wooden shed
To open again.
Dear father, my Mahātma, until we meet again.
Siofra O’Donovan ©
January 9 2009
And for some reason I didn’t write about the fact that I’d also dreamed about a little boy running down the street. It was like this photo below (in fact I’d sent him a card of this very photo once) but it was an Indian boy, not a French one. I wonder was that his next life he was rushing into, because he was always in a hurry, looking at his watch, watching the ‘third hand’ ticking. Hassling my mother into getting out of the house on time and if she didn’t, he’d get into the bloody car and beep. That never went down well but he did mellow over time.
He’d have said it was nonsense of course. But the other poem that was read out at his wake was his own poem, a take on The Serenity Prayer, which he kept in his pocket with a little chrome plaque embossed with Dürer’s prayer hands. Anyway, my father wrote a lot of poetry and he’d read it to us when there was an occasion (unless it was a poem that would be insulting to one of us) and friends and, it seems, to his AA friends. Now, somebody read this version he’d written of the Serenity Prayer, called, by him, Senility Prayer, at his wake. What happened next? The funeral. I won’t go on about that, don’t worry. Except that the priest was a renegade one who’d been living in a commune in California, and had me read Buddhist prayers and do the frankincense over my father’s coffin. He was fired, soon after.
SENILITY PRAYER
God grant me the senility
To forget the people I never liked anyway
The good fortune to run into the ones that I do
And the eyesight to tell the difference.
-Donal O’Donovan © 2006
And after that, over the next few years, (because, I presume, some AA person sent this poem to some other AA folks in the USA), the poem went viral. It is all over crappy fridge magnets, tea towels, mugs, posters, T shirts, all over the USA. And never once has my father been credited.
Well, that’s it for now, folks. Wishing you all a happy new year… if you see this poem on some cheap merchandise … please let me know!
Thank you Dad for your amazing sense of humour, your courage to give up the booze ‘forever’ your wonderful impulsive adventurousness, your obsession with history, your acerbic wit, your love and your support in all things… Missing you, very much.
SHERAB’S STORY
A hard time coming we had of it
Just me and my mother
Budding and bonding for the stipulated time
Then the final two days
Of paradoxical push and pull
Towards the sweet milk of life
10.04am, 21.06.07
Donal O’Donovan ©
CORNED BEEF OR BAGGAGE
A baby lies in her belly, halfway to delivery
Delivery to what looks from his point of view, an
Ugly and noisy universe. But he wants, he kicks
To get there, to make his own mark
Some of his people question his right
To be, to be tossing and turning and kicking
To be looking to his mother for life and love
In phase two of his earthbound existence
What do they know of how he came?
Of the godsent strength of his lifes blood
And the pulse of the others around him
Who wish him godspeed on his journey?
6 February 2007
© Donal O’Donovan
The above poem Dad wrote when a relative judged me for having a child ‘out of wedlock’. It wasn’t exactly the case, as I was regarded as a wife in Tibetan culture, the only problem being that there were already other '(un-divorced) wives and there went on to be more (he does seem to be a serial polygamist). Anyway, the daughter of this relative who had no idea of what was going on in my life, had her own daughter give birth well ‘out of wedlock’ in recent years! Nothing wrong, but don’t judge, please… it happens to happen a lot !
Credited or not - what a legacy!
I love the poem you read out at your Dad's wake. I hope he is happy in his otherworld.