Trevor Landers grew up on a farm in Kaūpokonui, Taranaki in his native New Zealand. He has strong genealogical connections to the Republic of Ireland and to two Māori tribes near his birth place. In the past he has been a University lecturer, National Advisor, hospital orderly, farm-hand and worked in the public sector in national roles.  He has been widely published in New Zealand and internationally. He is currently putting the finishing touches on a 600 page anthology which pays homage to a tribe in his home province of Taranaki. He is also slowly researching a PhD in Creative Writing with a strong emphasis on post-colonial studies. He currently lives and works in the Belgian capital, Bruxelles.

 

Driving home to Galway  

 

Trevor M Landers

 

the road home winds & swirls like a coil

the music on the radio is scratchy

the station’s signal is lost in trees & the sun had set to a point 

where everything has a reddish hue 

it stains the trees, the grass, the glossy sides of the cars 

that drove in front of us, the smooth bitumen we drive upon

the faux leather seats, the metal of the adjustable headrest

the tips of my hair, the tips of my fingernails, 

my skin, and all of the things that sat with us in silence.

I close my eyes and just feel.

We are driving in though a heartland.

 

Riversong for Tuam

 

To the memory of Sr Bridie Heverin,  Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary 

 

Doves emerge,

     cruciform, fluttering from a farmer’s shed

            a flee, a flight, the freedom of height

wheeling freely over emerald & a gnarled oak tree

   standing like a talisman, a venerable waypoint

keeper of whispers & secret dreams

      below, the river remembers —river of  shadow,

             uncoiling from its corrie cradle,

       a black lake cupped in the mountain’s palm

      where Cú Chulainn, they say, hurled his defiance,

boulder upon boulder across the riven glen,

    the hero’s shade still stitched into the water’s name.

         each undulation, embroidered history, down from 

     cloud-girt rampart, stone fist raised against the firmament,

      glacier-graven, elder than any crown,

         threading the drumlin and the reed-choked haugh,

             the bog’s brown liturgy of sedge and moss —

               a country no surveyor’s chain could ever measure.

They came, of course. They always came: 

      the covetous rod, the plantation’s ledger,

          snarled razing of the sacred woods —

             oaks felled to timber other kingdoms’ fleets,

              unfurling his cartographies of hunger,

                pressed like a thumb on the throat of song, 

That river would never be enclosed.

       behold the bradán, the salmon, silver insurgent,

            flinging itself against the oppressor’s currents

     leaping the weir, the fall, the sheer impossible,

   ancestral cognisance ablaze along its flanks —

no fence, no patent, no imperial writ contains the leaping of that fish.

       gorse ignites the hillsides, 

   bog-cotton lifts its thousand pale flags

that are not surrenders at all, but the banners of the unbought.

        Listen — the curlew uncurls its immemorial grief,

         the chough wheels crimson-shod above the strand,

            proud heron stands, grey sentinel, unbudged,

               peregrine unsheathes itself from heaven,

and somewhere in the whin the wren, an dreoilín,

      least and last of kings, still cantillates the old tongue.

 

Riversong II: Finding ancestors 

 

For this they never fathomed:

you may plant the field, but never the river;

you may fell the oak, but not the word it shelters;

you may famish the flesh, but not the Gaeilge in the throat,

not the salmon’s leap, not the mountain’s memory,

not the shadow-hero folded in the flood —

the Riversong that outlives every empire,

running, still running, unvanquished to the sea,

to Galway Bay, away yo the grey Atlantic’s roar,

bearing its cargo of the unforgotten,

emerald, indelible, and free

the voices, so familiar to me. 

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