Separated from the Death of Noise
Poems by Donal O'Donovan, 1928-2009
Well if I think of it, do we really know anyone? Their true selves, their cosmic selves, their essential selves. That they themselves do not even know and nor most of us, we do not know our own selves. Selves. Elves. My father used to pun a lot. And to exagerrate the wasshhherry T’s… ‘Whashhh?’ ‘Oh, thassshhh…’ And he’d say a lot of other things, understood only by himself. He was indeed my hero, but as I grew older I began to see that he himself was riddled with self doubt, despite all of his worldly worldliness. His knowing of politicians, ambassadors, spies, journalists, financiers, all sorts. In the end, his best friend was a partially blind poet, musician and coal deliverer called Tony Mac- who said after my father passed away that he realised his surname meant Son of Donald. Dad wrote a poem about him in 1998:
A Man of Words
I never was a coal heaver
But I know a man who was
A man of wisdom, half my age
A man of words and poetry
I’ll tell you more than that
He had a reverence for age
And a deep love of sung verse
That he could compose himeslf
He played the harmonica too
With half sighted concentration
So that you knew he was living the notes
And thinking of nothing else
If there was a key to his mind
It was the clarity of his own half sight
The way he could command
His dancing feet to play football in Barcelona
© Donal O’Donovan, 1997
My father being Donal, the connection between them had a predestined quality. Over the many years of his life, my father knew a lot of people flung across continents, but towards the end he was rarely in touch with them. Most of them are dead now, he said, scrolling through the Death Notices in the Irish Times. He had a little Guinness pigskin wallet with a flipping address book filled with his scrawling, spidery, tiny handwriting, all the contacts he had in East Germany in his years as a spy. As a teenager, I borrowed the cool-looking wallet and promptly lost it on the 45A bus, to my father’s horror. All his contacts in the world of espionage, gone. I still feel bad about it to this day.
It is Dad’s poetry I’d like to share here. His lonely, internal world. Most especially as he faced his own death, once the diagnosis came.
Silence
Silence is the core of my fear: discuss.
When I am alone, which is always,
I am at war with my ideas, fencing with them
As though with martial intent
Or corralling them with hostile spikes
So that I am here and they are there
Separated by the death of noise
Unable to talk to God in case there is none.
-Donal O’Donovan, 8 February 2008
My father with his college sweetheart, Maureen
He had many girlfriends before my mother and like many lonely people, he never appeared to be lonely. Perhaps that is all of us. He had a wife before he married my mother called Karin, my half sister’s mother who was taken by cancer when my sister Kristin was eleven years old.
Germany, 1952
When the bus driver switched on the radio
Kurt Schumacher died for me,
The early morning news loudspeaking
The end of ohne Mich and ban the bomb.
It was a time to hate America
Once again. Ban the bomb
And ban the Bundesdort
And Yankee go home to hell
No NATO here we said
In the early morning of the day
Kurt Schumacher died-
And killed the dream he made.
The one-armed dream he dreamed
in Dachau where they hurt him
And hurt his prisoned eyes
And left his vision unimpaired
So we learnt to unban the bomb
And unwrap the bundled dollar
And so far our wars have been little ones
With only ten million dead.
© Donal O’Donovan
October 1982
Kurt Schumacher died on August 20th, 1952, in Bonn, West Germany. A prominent German politician and the first chairman of the Social Democratic Party of Germany after World War II, he spent time in concentration camps like Dachau for his anti-Nazi sentiments and later for a plot to kill Adolf Hitler in 1944.
In May 1946 he became chairman of the SPD for the three western zones of Allied-occupied Germany. His refusal to compromise with the communists, on the other hand, resulted in constant attacks from the Soviet zone. This might account for my father’s tone in the poem- he told me that he felt for East Germany, being the ‘underdog’ and disliked what happened to Western Germany with the USA influence. Schumacher was, however, committed to German reunification.
The next poem seems prophetic to me, in his understanding of USA foreign policy and ‘the enemy half within’.
That Tuesday
Pissing after a daylong feast of radio
I saw the marigolds from my lavatory window.
All I could say to their windblown wonder was
Piss off: a more terrible beauty is born.
The tallest towers have gone to groun
And five thousand of us with them
How to respond to the Pimpernel web,
To the enemy half within
Don Quixote had a job
Tilting at the windmills
It’s very hard to go to war
Riding Rosinante
© Donal O’Donovan
11 September 2001
ALONE
Dogs bark. The nightingale works by day.
And a snake sneaks greenly off the hot roadbed.
To me these offerings hav no meaning.
They happen in a place where ony I am alone.
Noises off. But off a me of no connection.
The kitten wont talk to me. Neither will she
Chase a fly. Why should she?
She too happens where only I am alone.
I think what I wuld have to do
To bring myself closer to the soil and its smells and sounds
Is to dig the garden. Or in some such way to break in.
If that is what I wanted : to be less alone, to be part.
© Donal O’Donovan
Castel del Piano, May 1999
Perhaps it was the lonliness that led my father to the bottle. He had great humour in his recovery years, and great wit as always. He wrote this skit on the AA Serenity Prayer in 2005. After his wake at which this poem was read (and yes, we have the original in his papers and we all remember the day he read it out at the kitchen table just after he wrote it), some AA person sent this poem to some other AA folks in the USA and that, presumably, is how 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.
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 © 2005
Dear Dad-Donal, We still miss you very much, fifteen years later. RIP.
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
A wonderful tribute to your father.
Beautiful, all of the poems. I do love yours.