THE YELLOW RIVER - Seán McSweeney & Gerard Smyth
The Yellow River is a tributary of the Blackwater (Kells), which joins the Boyne at Navan, County Meath that unites the personal histories of poet Gerard Smyth and artist Sean McSweeney. Gerard Smyth spent many summers in Meath staying with his grandmother and an aunt, whilst originally Sen McSweeney’s family lived in Clongill until the untimely death of his father. Over two years Gerard Smyth revisited Meath in further inquiry with Belinda Quirke, Director of Solstice, in the development of a new suite of poems, recollecting and revisiting significant sites of occurrence in the poet’s and county’s history. Sean McSweeney created new work from trips to his original home place and the county. McSweeney here responds lyrically to particular sites of Smyth’s poetry, whilst also depicting in watercolour, ink, tempera and drawing, the particular hues of The Royal County.
The Yellow River is a tributary of the Blackwater (Kells), which joins the Boyne at Navan, County Meath that unites the personal histories of poet Gerard Smyth and artist Sean McSweeney. Gerard Smyth spent many summers in Meath staying with his grandmother and an aunt, whilst originally Sen McSweeney’s family lived in Clongill until the untimely death of his father. Over two years Gerard Smyth revisited Meath in further inquiry with Belinda Quirke, Director of Solstice, in the development of a new suite of poems, recollecting and revisiting significant sites of occurrence in the poet’s and county’s history. Sean McSweeney created new work from trips to his original home place and the county. McSweeney here responds lyrically to particular sites of Smyth’s poetry, whilst also depicting in watercolour, ink, tempera and drawing, the particular hues of The Royal County.
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RELICS
Among the relics that were out of time
the plough that my grandfather walked behind
was left where it settled and ripened
into rust in the garden rain.
And down the lane I thought I heard
his plough horse, a piebald on the trot
trying to find the gate to the paddock
and the voice that used to lead her home
along the way where my grandfather saw
that winter wore its crown of thorns
and the stubble fields were all
like the whiskers on a corpse.
He would go out armed with spade or fork
or maybe a stick to beat the bushes –
grandfather who hammered the nail in the wall
that a horseshoe hangs on, who never envisaged
how his saplings would flourish
from supple branches to strong sinews
or how his virgin grass would become an idyll
for a city child in summer months.
I stand at crossroads where he stood
looking in four directions – this way and that,
a man of the last generation
to blow out the candles, put oil in the lamps.
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