Last Thursday night at the Dublin Yarnspinners, Batt Burns spoke a very moving poem by Brendan Kennelly called “The Story”. Right away I knew I wanted to learn it. I found the volume that houses it, Familiar Strangers: New and Selected Poems 1960-2004, at Waterstone Bookstore on Jarvis Street, but decided not to buy it in Ireland since it is a very large book. I didn’t want to schlep it around for another month. I figured I could find it on the internet, but I was wrong. Then I remembered that I was going to be at the Ballinasloe Library on Monday. When I got there, Moire helped me find it and I copied it out. Read it out-loud for the best effect.
The Story
The story was not born with Robbie Cox
Nor with his father
Nor his father’s father
But further back than any could remember.
Cox told the story
Over twelve nnights of Christmas.
It was the story
Made Christmas real.
When it was done
The new year in,
Made authentic by the story.
The old year was dead,
Buried by the story.
The man endured,
Deepened by the story.
When Cox died
The story died.
Nobody had time
To learn the story.
Christmas shriveled,
The old year was dust,
The new year nothing special,
So much time to be endured.
The people withered.
This withering hardly troubled them.
The story was a dead crow in a wet field,
An abandoned house, a rag on a bush,
A sick whisper in a dying room,
The shaking gash of an old man’s mouth
Breaking like burnt paper
Into black ashes the wind scatters,
People fleeing from famine.
Nobody has ever heard of them.
Nobody will ever speak for them.
I know the emptiness
Spread by the story’s death.
This emptiness is in the roads
And in the fields,
In men’s eyes and children’s voices,
In summer nights when stars
Play like rabbits behind Cox’s house,
House of the story
That once lived on lips
Like starlings startled from a tree,
Exploding in a sky of revelation,
Deliberate and free.
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