Helping to Stop a Hole
How we do not need to attempt the repair of everything, simply what we encounter broken or in need of care, along our way.
HELPING TO STOP A HOLE
The Burren
is nothing but the grating limestone,
boundless horizons
hemmed in by a labyrinth of low walls,
and the near skyline
broken here and there
by the bent and twisted Hawthorne,
pointing the way the wind had come
and kept coming, relentlessly
for season after season.
.
Sparse trees leaning like sentries
guarding meadows of flowers
from some where else,
all out of place and belonging,
clinging to the world
along the walls
of jagged ground-down teeth
that carried rumour of mortality
to men and even ancient unrelenting mountains,
shaped by the pressures of eternal unrelenting time.
.
The slow packed rock now risen
up above the land
that had accrued
patiently, for millions of years
at the bottom of the primordial sea,
now strewn and discarded
in careless arrangement
when once the ice had come this way.
.
And ordered in time
by the hands of generation after generation
of herders
as they criss crossed beneath the dome of sky
every which way,
building and repairing walls,
and stopping holes they chanced upon
as they went about their day.
.
The Burren smiles wide and weathered
riddled with ancient wonder
and countless cavities
in the molars of the place,
traps into what lies hid below
cunningly laid,
that longed to waylay
an errant foot of man or beast,
and pull the whole of that creature
down as far as width of the crevice would allow
into a passage to the small hell
of pain and inconvenience,
some so deep
one might fall right down
to the bottom of the world;
the deep hell
of being lost and utterly forgotten.
.
We stalked across The Burren
as it sucked the cold wind
through it’s grounded teeth
over wall and stile,
by tumbled cottage and collapsed tomb,
spying from the height of the fort
the cursed patch
where the enchanted cow had fallen
at last and come to death.
.
And as the crowd gathered up,
following with struggle,
the unfaltering stride
of Patrick McCormack
he marked a deep hole in the turf,
which was so square
I guessed wrongly it was made by man;
it’s bottom dark with menace.
I guessed his intention
as he scouted the nearby ground
and I hunted for an unused stone
which I had to pry loose with some effort
like a bridle
from the bite of sucking turf.
.
And I dropped it in the hole
Beside the one that he had found
and like a child again
I took pride
in that, my stone was bigger.
And like a man again
that I had crossed The Burren
and I helped to stop a hole.
As the day was closing on us,
a wide panorama opened up
as we crested the rise
the valley that lay waiting
stretching off impossibly
east and north and west,
and beyond
beyond the bounds of the island
to lands riddled with other holes.
.
“Which way are we headed?”
I asked.
As if to laugh kindly
at the fool I was
he raised his hand lightly
following the softest path
the cliffs might take
and said simply
“Down.”
.
As we crossed the last wall
before the very last wall
on the cliff itself
he said to me after we had been talking
about the land
and the way in which
the witch in us
had taken the sieve
to the udder of the cow,
”If the people of this time
when their time came
to be measured
it would be
Shame;
shame, shame, shame.”
.
And his heart was of a sore
that he took not the trouble
to hide upon his face;
like a father disappointed,
in his favourite son.
.
I heard the unspoken etiquette
in the wind and the timbre of his voice:
When you cross The Burren
if you chance upon a hole,
it is the charge of every man
to wrest an unused stone
always near to hand,
fill the mouth of the hole
that it may be stopped and that
you might belong again
to that ancient covenant of pilgrims
etching our way
beneath the dome of sky.
.
“Do unto others”
it said.
.
Rocco Jarman
May 2023
—
Photos: a leaning Hawthorne atop The Burren, and the cutting figure of Patrick McCormack, farmer, boxing coach, mender of walls, filler of holes.