Sing, Tyra, Svetlana, Viktoria,
what you sang on baptisms, birthdays,
weddings – requiems now echoing
only behind your eyes. Let local feet
tap you into the Fleadh – harmonica,
fiddle, tin-whistle carry you away
to town squares back home. Sing
and dance on, celebrating the meet
of countries while flags flap and you are
safe with what you never imagined:
Akhmatova, disguised as a Saint,
here in the tesserae in Mullingar.
Stories behind stories like yours behind
the pose, her gracious restraint.
* You might have heard of him in Kharkiv
where he studied Law: the man she called
the love of her life before his chosen exile,
his serial philandering hard to forgive:
the man with the massive, sensuous build
who created her here in the side-chapel
like a jigsaw in bits of glass, marble, gold,
his cutting-hammer, gum, horn-handled knife,
the flick of his wrist as he specialised,
after a forty-year absence, in her head, hands,
restoring a youth in mosaic unable to grow old –
and perhaps the secret preserved beyond life
of a matched passion she never surmised
from him, Boris Anrep, in time’s quicksands.
* Sing, Tyra, Svetlana, Viktoria –
as Akhmatova did to the one preserved
in her heart. Those you have lost
will stay as dreams and live on.
Dance to heard and unheard melodeons.
Patricia’s McCarthy’s recent publications include Whose Hand Would You Like to Hold (Agenda Editions). She is editor of the literary journal Agenda.
what you sang on baptisms, birthdays,
weddings – requiems now echoing
only behind your eyes. Let local feet
tap you into the Fleadh – harmonica,
fiddle, tin-whistle carry you away
to town squares back home. Sing
and dance on, celebrating the meet
of countries while flags flap and you are
safe with what you never imagined:
Akhmatova, disguised as a Saint,
here in the tesserae in Mullingar.
Stories behind stories like yours behind
the pose, her gracious restraint.
* You might have heard of him in Kharkiv
where he studied Law: the man she called
the love of her life before his chosen exile,
his serial philandering hard to forgive:
the man with the massive, sensuous build
who created her here in the side-chapel
like a jigsaw in bits of glass, marble, gold,
his cutting-hammer, gum, horn-handled knife,
the flick of his wrist as he specialised,
after a forty-year absence, in her head, hands,
restoring a youth in mosaic unable to grow old –
and perhaps the secret preserved beyond life
of a matched passion she never surmised
from him, Boris Anrep, in time’s quicksands.
* Sing, Tyra, Svetlana, Viktoria –
as Akhmatova did to the one preserved
in her heart. Those you have lost
will stay as dreams and live on.
Dance to heard and unheard melodeons.
Patricia’s McCarthy’s recent publications include Whose Hand Would You Like to Hold (Agenda Editions). She is editor of the literary journal Agenda.
