An Irish poet in Zimbabwe

September 04, 2018 I arrived in Harare with my wife and daughter in January 2016. It was the first time I had set foot on the African continent, let alone Zimbabwe. Until then I considered myself relatively well-travelled, we had come from Burma via Ireland – for Christmas – after a few years of living in Yangon and previous extensive travels in Asia, Europe, Russia and South America. However, Africa remained vague, I remember saying to someone that I'd leave exploring the African continent for another life. I think it was the well-travelled Somerset Maugham who said, it was possible to travel too much in life. We soon settled into Harare, in the leafy suburbs, ten kilometres from the city centre.

As a writer you always carry a country, or the myth of one, in your head. On arrival in Zimbabwe, I was hauling thoughts of Burma and Ireland around with me. I had the makings of a fourth book of poems and had begun work on a biography of an Irishman, Maurice Collis, who lived in and wrote on Burma. It was necessary to keep the South East Asian country alive in my mind – so I filled my study with maps, books and Burmese bric a brac. A navy-black drongo from that tropical world flitted on our lawn in Harare, the same species of bird that bobbed in our garden in Yangon.  The bird connected two loci while Zimbabwe weaved its way into my imagination and everyday. I began putting shape to the book that would become Monsoon Diary. There was a kind of oscillation with the poems ranging between Ireland and Burma and elsewheres of the mind and heart.

My last collection, Ocean Letters (2011) was published a few weeks after the birth of my daughter and the death of my father, so neither figured in that book since it usually takes me two years between the event and the poem’s realisation. Ocean Letters questioned travel, home and displacement. Two years after the book’s publication we uprooted ourselves again, this time to Burma.

Rewriting, refining and reworking the poems that made Monsoon Diary was enhanced by living in Zimbabwe, giving me the conditions to write and providing the detachment that distance gives. And it was inevitable and necessary for me that Zimbabwe and Africa would figure toward the end of the book. ‘I Remember a Clear Morning' [below], is a poem of settlement and surprise or both, reviving my ornithological leanings. An elegy for my mother, ‘A Rose from Franschhoek’ [below], is framed around a journey of the Cape coast when a phone call from home changed everything.  I think this poem is a fitting closure to the book, a settlement of sorts.

I Remember a Clear Morning
after The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon
       
                  for Richard Halperin

Sei Shōnagon records, despite the bright sun,
dew still dripping from chrysanthemums
in the garden, how, on the tatters
of spider-webs, raindrops hung like pearls.

This morning I heaved the rattan sofa
to the veranda and began some sedentary
birdwatching using the camera lens
for binoculars and matching the digital

images against the more precise drawings
of Newman’s South African Birds.Without my stirring,
navy, fork-tailed Drongos flitted on the lawn
alongside Sunbird bottle-green flickers

with impossible red disappearing into ornamental
trees. Southern Masked Weavers, meaning
a voltage of yellow with a face washed in black.
A Powder Blue Waxbill washed vigorously

in the birdbath before the outré primaries
of the Purple-crested - and therefore common -
Turaco appeared in flight with its hollow
Ro Ko Ko rising to a strident crescendo.

And, like Sei Shōnagon, I described later
how beautiful it all was, and what was impressive
was they were not at all impressed.

A Rose from Franschhoek

In the Dutch gabled cottage in Franschhoek
which we took for a few days and where
a different rose arrangement was placed
in every room - the most fragrant, a singular red rose
she’d never been able to propagate,
in the window of our bedroom overlooking
a vineyard and part of its frame,
a gable-hugging lemon tree with lemons ready for gin.
 
Leaving, I placed that rose in the back window
of the car unsure of what I’d do with it,
and after a bear–hug from Alison in her berry field,
a mother’s embrace that would later resonate,
we drove down for hours to the coast
through various highland passes which brought to mind 
Kerry and the west of Ireland were it not for vineyards.
All three of us hoping we’d see the last
of the Southern Right Whales.

Spring should have been warming up the shallows
they were fond of and very soon they’d depart,
but on the pier that afternoon we’d left summer
in the mountains and sky and sea turned ominously dark.
No boats putting out, and yesterday’s warmth
gave way to wind, turned Hermanus into any forlorn seaside town,
as we retreated to the shack at the end of the pier,
drank dry white wine and feasted on fish.

Comparing Hermanus to other seaside places,
Clougherhead, Chiloe or Lahinch, that certain abandon
of places in service to the sea –
our guesthouse room faced the sea, recalling
another in Ballybunion, and the mood of both
was of a retirement home. That night a call
came through that you’d suddenly deteriorated
slipped down a notch from your already low register.

Mother, you didn’t know me last summer
and how could you? Imagine, you now in your room
of the dune-facing, sea-obscuring nursing home,
listing badly, and for how long? Nothing to be done.
Next morning, as we set off again for the pier,
the rose in the car window had turned from red
to black but still carried its heady scent.
In December last year the fortune-teller whose surgery
fringed the Sule Pagoda in Rangoon told me I’d nothing

to worry over for the next two years, but advised,
keep rosewater and roses about me and find time
to spend in a monastery. An hour crossing the bay
and with the mountains falling back, I’m in mind
of the sea journey to Boffin, tracking Terns with binoculars,
when a first sighting was called out and a carbuncled back
or head half-reared and then water was blown with impunity,
as we awaited the declarative tail flip our daughter wished for.

But the underwater shadow we see, I tell her,
is the size of ten elephants and its accompanying shadow
is of a calf. And soon, a second mother and calf are sighted.
Then a fin-flip by way of a wave and we are eventually delivered
back to the seafood shack, exhausted by oxygen.
In the bookshop that afternoon, a for-once cheery owner
notices my accent and mentions how Ryan’s Daughter
was part-filmed down the coast because of its resemblance to Kerry.

I tell him I remember being on the film set,
a village on a hill at dusk long after the crew had gone …
our first family holiday in ’73. I was seven,
and remember catching up with the adults in fear
of being left behind on the slopes of that ghosted place.
Robert Mitchum drinking alone and asking
my now dead neighbour, Drink with me as no one else will...
I’m come to Ireland to find myself drinking alone…
everyone fearing the pull of his dark star. 

Two books ‘face out’ on the same shelf, and I remark
to the owner on the facial resemblance of Lawrence of Arabia
and Ian Smith, mentioning that I live in Zimbabwe. 
That, I have never noticed, but Smith was a gentleman to the last,
and ended his days in a retirement home on the coast here. 
Until his dying day, he expected to be called back
to resolve Rhodesia’s - sorry, Zimbabwe’s - problems. 

At the guesthouse I step out. To its rear a spine of high
Patagonian mountains, around its front the white horses
of the Atlantic; juggling the journey in hand and an immanent
one home, and was I certain I’d said goodbye?
The sun already set, but still gilding a glass-fronted villa;
a painting by an African Hopper, but an African Hopper
might record the visual untidiness of Hermanus,
its townships and sprawl of shanties;
their inhabitants oddly voided from the centre.

At Cape Point, can I be any further away
from your ordeal? A Finistère or Fin del Mondo
and foolish of me to think I’m gathering any of this
for you, or that beauty can quell your faintly
ringing bell down the coast of Africa. Turning here
is to begin getting closer, my own turning towards
lights of old. Your teetotaller life and strong heart
keeping you above water.  A missed call close
to Cape Town, and I think the worst,

the family gathered and in vigil, a nurse asks
might anyone be left, sometimes they can be
holding on for someone? The phone put
to my mother’s unconscious ear, I tell her
gently to let go. Instead of right for Harare,
it’s now left for home. You, a walking book of proverbs,
would stop walking that night, and a rose dried
to a bulb of incense, all the way from Franschhoek
to rest by your unassailed ear.

[Poems from Monsoon Diary, Dedalus Press, 2018]