‘Kanturk’
by Anthony Keating
(written following his visit to Kanturk Arts Festival in 2011 as Guest Reader)
I came here as a guest,
To a town where radicalism tangos
With twitching nets,
Part stranger, part prodigal,
In a home I know yet don’t know,
Retracing steps I’ve taken but never lived,
A ghost in negative with demented recall,
Led on a leash of blood
By the doubting boy and runaway girl,
That well in my DNA.
A diaspora tourist
Exploring the streets and places
Whose names punctuated my childhood,
Strand St, Market House,
Kilroe and St Patrick’s Place,
Still vibrant in the workaday world,
Whilst Keating’s like the station
Stands as history,
Culled by commerce,
Eroding into another Shradeen.
Here where even the rivers are crossed in rhyme
I came to ply my craft, a journeyman poet
In the Trade Union Hall,
A pedlar of verse,
-That connective tissue of the generations-
Hoping my set honours its ghosts,
My words distilled from the land, rivers and sky,
Scoped for those fractional truths,
That unify the living, the exiled and the dead.
A sentient archaeology we hold in trust
The legacy of those who stayed and those that left
Souls swept away on the confluence of rivers,
To the Blackwater, Youghal and the sea,
Where like so many salmon they smolted for exile,
In brackish estuaries that hardened their pelts,
And like the salmon,
So many never to return,
Save as dust, embraced by the fertile soil,
And those who remembered to stay,
To build a future unconstrained by the past.