We resided in a Loreto convent in the centre of Dublin city
On the east side of a public gardens, St. Stephen’s Green.
Grafton Street - the paseo
Where everybody paseo’d, including even ourselves -
Debouched on the north side, and at the top of Grafton Street,
Or round the base of the great patriotic pebble of O’Donovan Rossa,
Knelt tableaus of punk girls and punk boys.
When I used to pass them - scurrying as I went -
Often as not to catch a mass in Clarendon Street,
The Carmelite Church in Clarendon Street
(Myself, I never used the Clarendon Street entrance,
I always slipped in by way of Johnson’s Court,
Opposite the side entrance to Bewley’s Oriental Cafe),
I could not help but smile, as I sucked on a Fox’s mint,
That for all the half-shaven heads and the martial garb
And the dyed hair-dos ad the nappy pins
They looked so conventional, really, and vulnerable,
Clinging to war paint and to uniforms and to one another.
I knew it was myself who was the ultimate drop-out,
The delinquent, the recidivist, the vagabond,
The wild woman, the subversive, the original punk.
Yet, although I confess I was smiling, I was also afraid,
Appalled by my own nerve, my own fervour,
My apocalyptic enthusiasm, my other-worldly hubris:
To opt out of the world and to
Choose such exotic loneliness,
Such terrestrial abandonment,
A lifetime of bicycle lamps and bicycle pumps,
A lifetime of galoshes stowed under the stairs,
A lifetime of umbrellas drying out in the kitchens.
I was an old nun - an aged beadswoman -
But I was no daw.
I knew what a weird bird I was, I knew that when we
Went to bed we were as eerie an aviary as you’d find
In all the blown-off rooftops of the city:
Scuttling about our dorm, wheezing, shrieking, croaking,
In our yellowy corsets, wonky suspenders, strung-out garters,
A bony brew in the gods of the sleeping city.
Many’s the night I lay awake in bed
Dreaming what would befall us if there were a fire:
No fire-escapes outside, no fire-extinguishers inside;
To coin a Dublin saying,
We’d not stand a snowball’s chance in hell. Fancy that!
It seemed too good to be true:
Happy death vouchsafed only to the few.
Sleeping up there was like sleeping at the top of the mast
Of a nineteenth-century schooner, and in the daytime
We old nuns were the ones who crawled out on the yardarms
To stitch and sew the rigging and the canvas.
To be sure we were weird birds, oddballs, Christniks,
For we had done the weirdest thing a woman can do -
Surrendered the marvellous passions of girlhood
The innocent dreams of childhood,
Not for a night or a weekend or even a Lent or a season,
But for a lifetime.
Never to know the love of a man or a woman;
Never to have children of our own;
Never to have a home of our own;
All for why and for what?
To follow a young man - would you believe it -
Who lived two thousand years ago in Palestine
And who died a common criminal strung up on a tree.
As we stood there in the disintegrating dormitory
Burning to death in the arms of Christ -
O Christ, Christ, come quickly, quickly -
Fluttering about in our tight, gold bodices,
Beating our wings in vain,
It reminded me of the snaps one of the sisters took
When we took a seaside holiday in 1956
(The year Cardinal Mindszenty went into hiding
In the US legation in Budapest.
He was a great hero of ours, Cardinal Mindszenty,
And any of us would have given our right arm
To have been his nun - darning his socks, cooking his meals,
Making his bed, doing his washing and ironing).
Somebody - an affluent buddy of the bishop’s repenting his affluence -
Loaned Mother Superior a secluded beach in Co. Waterford -
Ardmore, along the coast from Tramore -
A cove with palm trees, no less, well off the main road.
There we were, fluttering up and down the beach,
Scampering hither and thither in our starched bathing-costumes.
Tonight, expiring in the fire, was quite much like that,
Only instead of scampering into the waves of the sea,
Now we were scampering into the flames of the fire.
That was one of the gayest days of my life,
The day the sisters went swimming.
Often in the silent darkness of the chapel after Benediction,
During the Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament,
I glimpsed the sea again as it was that day.
Praying - daydreaming really -
I became aware that Christ is the ocean
Forever rising and falling on the world’s shore.
Now tonight in the convent Christ is the fire in whose waves
We are doomed but delighted to drown.
And, darting in and out of the flames of the dormitory,
Gabriel, with that extraordinary message of his on his boyish lips,
Frenetically pedalling his skybike.
He whispers into my ear what I must do
And I do it - and die.
Each of us in our own tiny, frail, furtive way
Was a Mother of God, mothering forth illegitimate Christs
In the street life of Dublin city.
God have mercy on our whirring souls -
Wild women were we all -
And on the misfortunate, poor fire-brigade men
Whose task it will be to shovel up our ashes and shovel
What is left of us into black plastic refuse sacks.
Fire-brigade men are the salt of the earth.
Isn’t it a marvellous thing how your hour comes
When you least expect it? When you lose a thing,
Not to know about it until it actually happens?
How, in so many ways, losing things is such a refreshing experience,
Giving you a sense of freedom you’ve not often experienced?
How lucky I was to lose - I say, lose - lose my life.
It was a Sunday night, and after vespers
I skipped bathroom so that I could hop straight into bed
And get a bit of a read before lights out:
Conor Cruise O’Brien’s new book The Siege,
All about Israel and superlatively insightful
For a man who they say is reputedly an agnostic -
I got a loan of it from the brother-in-law’s married niece -
But I was tired out and I fell asleep with the book open
Face down across my breast and I woke
to the racket of bellowing flame and snarling glass.
The first thing I thought was that the brother-in-law’s married niece
Would never again get her Conor Cruise O’Brien back
And I had seen on the price-tag that it cost €23.00:
Small wonder that the custom of snipping off the price
As an exercise in social deportment has simply died out;
Indeed a book today is almost worth buying for its price,
Its price frequently being more remarkable than its contents.
The strange Eucharist of my death -
To be eaten alive by fire and smoke.
I clasped the dragon to my breast
And stroked his red-hot ears.
Strange! There we were, all sleeping molecules,
Suddenly all giving birth to our deaths,
All frantically in labour.
Doctors and midwives weaved in and out
In gowns of smoke and gloves of fire.
Christ, like an Orthodox patriarch in his dressing-gown,
Flew up and down the dormitory, splashing water on our souls:
Sister Eucharia; Sister Seraphia; Sister Rosario;
Sister Gonzago; Sister Margaret; Sister Edith.
If you will remember us - six nuns burnt to death -
Remember us for the frisky girls that were,
Now more than ever kittens in the sun. |