tara christie
and they stopped me in my tracks with horror:
thedark pits of trenches, youth’s smashed-up
hopes, the carnage wracked my conscience,
I who was never within an ounce of my life,
who never had to pile over the top and into battle,
who never lost out in any of the bloodshed,
I who never saw young soldiers torched
and dumped in an open field of slaughter,
their blighted bodies stinking with death,
I who was never plunged in the mud and mire,
never shell-shocked or stung by a bullet
sucking out my life like some crazy bee honey...
O, don’t mind me, Isaac Rosenberg, calling you
from here, my safe-house of love poems,
while Europe still eats its heart out;
only mine was light with joy, my lover
beside me in all his glory, every limb,
joint, rim, every bit of him tempting me
to believe that we’re safe together,
that life is for feasting
and love wards off trouble.
The larks tell me what they told you,
before you were blown to pieces—
that love and music beat war and empire;
and though I’ve never been in action,
though I’ve had a safe, ordinary life,
looking after my own and keeping out of it,
I want to assure you, poet whose truth
was bared to the bones in World War 1,
I too am on the side of light, and of life.^81We might first ask what promptsO Searcaigh’s turn to Rosenberg in this poem. As ́
with Longley,O Searcaigh’s primal tap-root into the First World War is through his ́
own family history. As a child,O Searcaigh was ‘mesmerized’ by the sepia-coloured ́
military photograph of his father’s uncle, John Gallagher, a ‘young, very handsome
maninarmydress....I always kept looking at it...because of that photo alone,
I think I became more fascinated with the First World War than the Second.’^82 But
O Searcaigh’s turn to Rosenberg is precipitated not by meditating on the war, but ra- ́
ther by hearing the singing of larks early one morning after a night of ‘courting|out
(^81) ‘Do Isaac Rosenberg’/‘For IsaacRosenberg’, trans. Frank Sewell,Human Rights Have No Borders,
ed. Kenneth Morgan and Almut Schlepper (Dublin: Marino Books, 1998), 139–42; quoted by
permission of CathalOSearcaigh. ́
(^82) O Searcaigh, telephone interview with Tara Christie, 29 June 2005. ́