Ted McCarthy
Ted Mc Carthy is a poet and translator living in Clones, Ireland. His work has appeared in magazines in Ireland, the UK, Germany, the USA, Canada and Australia. His first collection 'November Wedding', won the Brendan Behan Award. He has also published a second, 'Beverly Downs' in the Moth ‘Some Poems’ series.
His work can be found on
Published 09/29/17
His work can be found on
Published 09/29/17
"Already"
That generation finally gone
who, growing up, we thought would live forever,
we turned to find
you drifting off, gently, on a river
still a long way from the rapids.
Friend of my childhood, when
did it happen, that pain of having slipped
your moorings, knowing it too late?
And you were always placid.
We assumed the stillness in your mind
was as it had ever been,
if slightly deeper, born
of tragedy and tiredness. Once your eyes
flickered in hesitation
before the commonplace, an instant, gone.
I missed the far confusions;
restless in your house, that view
I always thought as Mediterranean,
you saw the bay eating its way toward you.
Our town falls, slate by slate,
into its thousand years - but you, so soon,
memory and what it should outlast taken
by that most hateful thief; and now too late
to miss you, already here and gone.
"Paper Hat"
A wide shore,
the square. A child leans back
into the huge shell of a hand,
trusting to the granite fingers to break
his fall. He turns and grins
at his baby sister
as noon chimes
and the crowd strain to where
two figures merge: time eating time.
True, it’s been played before
but old and child alike
can’t help but look
until the dull
ache that draws sight down.
But someone is always lost, has stepped
into a moment of their own
and stands there, rapt,
as if land fell
away like time
an inch beyond their feet.
The grey hand opens like a blossom,
a tattered paper hat takes flight
tracing the ragged rhythm
of the instant,
the heat that traps
or buoys it on a whim of breath,
keeping it gently out of grasp,
a juggling of trance and breeze,
the moment studded with
infinities.
"A Crumbling Chimney"
In the morning the footpath is flaked
with red chippings, red dust,
that deep rich orange that comes
only from a certain age of brick
and in the crumbling only the slightest
hint remains of its shape, its packed
wholeness. The fire it seems
has shed itself in the last storm.
This is the way a house sometimes
dies, from the outside in,
obvious like a lesion on the skin
with a fullness of life enclosed, not caring
or keeping a fast grip on joy, at home
in the fading littleness of cheerful rooms
where nothing that matters is beyond repair
and the creak of decay is happening anywhere.
Remember the brickworks at night,
fields white and starched like a fresh sheet?
In the middle of nowhere red stars glowed
through ventilation chinks. Trees nearby stayed
green longer, budded out early
and birds in winter squabbled for a warm roost,
or is that another trick the mind played
when everything shut down? There have been so many,
and even now at times the body snaps awake
at four in the morning say, in a panic
over something that will never come about,
a memory that's finally escaped,
or from a dream of an irreparable leak.
The world must make its way through the tightest
seal, brick weather, ridge tile slip,
the mind, however terrified, fall back to sleep.
Last night's lash of wind and rain leaves a trail
of mortar-grit and flakes of red
across the roof; a galaxy of damp has spread
along the attic wall. Now begins the inevitable
patching up that will one day be one
too many. But in my life's eye I have it still,
that first long sight of brick, far-stretching, beautiful,
sunset and a sea to sail on.
"Ballast"
The sea may never surrender all its ghosts
but in the end each boat coughs up its ballast.
Not these stones, though. How many million
shocks have smoothed them, each collision
a death, a dropping off; far beyond the reach
of questions, their shearing away, their first pitch
into the infinite. And what are we
but ants clambering across a rock pitched up from the sea?
None of which mattered to you, content
with what land promised and the seasons lent,
for you knew it was all on loan; strive as we must,
the earth that fed would as quietly swallow our dust,
and when you came here it was to see how
all things end; to make you steadier at the plough.
"Tapes"
Old shelves lined
with boxes, labels peeling.
A sudden strangeness of light,
a spider scurrying to shelter.
I lift a handful of tapes
then step back and try
to calculate the hours,
the attentiveness to song,
each modulated phrase known
by heart when this door
swung shut on her life.
Memory dies. Tapes die
when the last machine
gives up the ghost.
I see now
how at the very end
her old faithful music decks
fell silent one by one
as if standing to attention.
She slept fitfully in silence
and what music there was
she kept, not locked away,
but in a dearth of sound
where it could be remembered,
a kind of purity
like that first recollection
she spoke of once:
a child bewildered
by so many rushing tides
wiping what she’d thought immovable;
yet standing firm
on that dizzy ground,
her inner ear perfectly pitched.
That generation finally gone
who, growing up, we thought would live forever,
we turned to find
you drifting off, gently, on a river
still a long way from the rapids.
Friend of my childhood, when
did it happen, that pain of having slipped
your moorings, knowing it too late?
And you were always placid.
We assumed the stillness in your mind
was as it had ever been,
if slightly deeper, born
of tragedy and tiredness. Once your eyes
flickered in hesitation
before the commonplace, an instant, gone.
I missed the far confusions;
restless in your house, that view
I always thought as Mediterranean,
you saw the bay eating its way toward you.
Our town falls, slate by slate,
into its thousand years - but you, so soon,
memory and what it should outlast taken
by that most hateful thief; and now too late
to miss you, already here and gone.
"Paper Hat"
A wide shore,
the square. A child leans back
into the huge shell of a hand,
trusting to the granite fingers to break
his fall. He turns and grins
at his baby sister
as noon chimes
and the crowd strain to where
two figures merge: time eating time.
True, it’s been played before
but old and child alike
can’t help but look
until the dull
ache that draws sight down.
But someone is always lost, has stepped
into a moment of their own
and stands there, rapt,
as if land fell
away like time
an inch beyond their feet.
The grey hand opens like a blossom,
a tattered paper hat takes flight
tracing the ragged rhythm
of the instant,
the heat that traps
or buoys it on a whim of breath,
keeping it gently out of grasp,
a juggling of trance and breeze,
the moment studded with
infinities.
"A Crumbling Chimney"
In the morning the footpath is flaked
with red chippings, red dust,
that deep rich orange that comes
only from a certain age of brick
and in the crumbling only the slightest
hint remains of its shape, its packed
wholeness. The fire it seems
has shed itself in the last storm.
This is the way a house sometimes
dies, from the outside in,
obvious like a lesion on the skin
with a fullness of life enclosed, not caring
or keeping a fast grip on joy, at home
in the fading littleness of cheerful rooms
where nothing that matters is beyond repair
and the creak of decay is happening anywhere.
Remember the brickworks at night,
fields white and starched like a fresh sheet?
In the middle of nowhere red stars glowed
through ventilation chinks. Trees nearby stayed
green longer, budded out early
and birds in winter squabbled for a warm roost,
or is that another trick the mind played
when everything shut down? There have been so many,
and even now at times the body snaps awake
at four in the morning say, in a panic
over something that will never come about,
a memory that's finally escaped,
or from a dream of an irreparable leak.
The world must make its way through the tightest
seal, brick weather, ridge tile slip,
the mind, however terrified, fall back to sleep.
Last night's lash of wind and rain leaves a trail
of mortar-grit and flakes of red
across the roof; a galaxy of damp has spread
along the attic wall. Now begins the inevitable
patching up that will one day be one
too many. But in my life's eye I have it still,
that first long sight of brick, far-stretching, beautiful,
sunset and a sea to sail on.
"Ballast"
The sea may never surrender all its ghosts
but in the end each boat coughs up its ballast.
Not these stones, though. How many million
shocks have smoothed them, each collision
a death, a dropping off; far beyond the reach
of questions, their shearing away, their first pitch
into the infinite. And what are we
but ants clambering across a rock pitched up from the sea?
None of which mattered to you, content
with what land promised and the seasons lent,
for you knew it was all on loan; strive as we must,
the earth that fed would as quietly swallow our dust,
and when you came here it was to see how
all things end; to make you steadier at the plough.
"Tapes"
Old shelves lined
with boxes, labels peeling.
A sudden strangeness of light,
a spider scurrying to shelter.
I lift a handful of tapes
then step back and try
to calculate the hours,
the attentiveness to song,
each modulated phrase known
by heart when this door
swung shut on her life.
Memory dies. Tapes die
when the last machine
gives up the ghost.
I see now
how at the very end
her old faithful music decks
fell silent one by one
as if standing to attention.
She slept fitfully in silence
and what music there was
she kept, not locked away,
but in a dearth of sound
where it could be remembered,
a kind of purity
like that first recollection
she spoke of once:
a child bewildered
by so many rushing tides
wiping what she’d thought immovable;
yet standing firm
on that dizzy ground,
her inner ear perfectly pitched.