The Fraoch

Irish Legends

This world so full of high beauty
And cruel misunderstanding
Tracing the root, under peat
Where origins are found
At the tip,
Eye powerless.

The Fraoch

How did the fraoch catch
Blaze in fire, me to blame
I sought to tend
To wilderness
When gusts whipped
Dark unknowns to flame.

Men have hunted on these moors
They must
For furs, not honest folk
Who take the lot
For other mouths beside the pot
But those with ferrets yoked, dogs
Who come for sport
And leave a dozen gutted pelts
Athwart a stick
Thence to market to turn a trick
The flames would birth for them.

I came with canvas,
Palette and brush
For sense of place
And in no rush
To paint and sit at dusk.

Was it the cackle
Of a tattered crow, that fell
Hard as flint and sparked the grass.
No.
Was it the stone I threw
Without care
To chase the sagging silhouette
To air.
No.
Was it some unknown arsonist
While I had left my seat
That struck a spiteful match
To the heather ‘broidered heath
No.

The sketch was misunderstood
As light faded
Condemned as modernist
A poor impressionist
With hands of wood.
It was never my intent
I meant to paint as Constable
But unappointed to such skill
I didn’t reach to what I could.

I didn’t believe
In one evening I  could
Capture with a brush 
All essence of the Aos Si
Magic of this land
Beneath the peat
Which grain by grain, in time
The sea shall understand.
It was beyond my hand.

Ah, but there’s the rub
I cannot lie
Of my enchantment
Our star, who rises at dawn
Above all men, warm beyond
The horizon, pillowed on waves
I thought myself so wise.

When I was young
I would have chased
Blue over scarlet
Back and forth across the canvas
Vain siege on enchanted air
The changing moor
Eluding my brush
Till all was muddied
And I was lost in darkness.
I thought myself so wise

To paint the gathering at the gate
Rolling country, the step
Where the bar spills
Intoxicated mouths gape
At our star sinking through Fand’s rest.

And yet fire fanned behind
I didn’t know the land, the season
When so dry, small frictions
Can turn to fuse a tuft
And cinders wick through root
Just a whisper, it must have took
The scent passed missed
The dark peat blistered
And Cailleachan came
I turned to face as ambushed
A fraoch of linging flame.

I stood for all I could
What can one man do
But pat, stamp feet
And tip a glass in hope
On furnaced heath
Admit defeat and flee.
I left my easel
Which had but a crude sketch
I never should’ve left.

I had been distracted
When the fraoch lit
Ran and hid amid high rocks
Sketch left as sacrificial fuel
The Aos Si know me as some
Blocked Hockney, Hackneyed fool
Who would sculpt a crude Picasso
Slash masterpieces and call it art
I know not
How many ways to cry.

I am not one to take the sword
And cross the ford to win a prize
Not mine
I kept my brushes for the moor
Not to capture fair Fionnabhair
On canvas, she had tired
Of all those fallen for her
I was told.

Had I painted as my intent
Undistracted, thought
In watercolour
On perspective, all attention spent
The depth of picture
Would have been clear
The fraoch within my care
As the flames rose
I didn’t do that, not then
Not there.

When I was young
I would have dreamed
Of running back to the fraoch
After the flames were done
To live upon the heath
Under the gaze of the sun
Notwithstanding disbelief
But now feet know concrete
And nothing will grow till spring.

If I had the caught the fire
Before it lit the Sidhe
Oh if, if, only if
I cannot lie
I had a hope
That gossip by the gate
And a kinder hand of fate
Would see me tend a fire
Some year upon the moor.
That and nothing more
Than to place a pot upon a hearth
Open to all but cold wind
And long odds of rest of last
And to call the heath our kitchen.
That wasn’t how it happened.

The Canvas

Behind closed windows
On a studio canvas
Lit by electric light
The tip to this root
Is not so elusive
But who really knows
In the long run.
The season, friction, a whisper
I sat, back
Facing the setting sun.