| Ros Rua
Looking For U2 And word came down from Boulger's Bar: Bono, The Edge, those shades, that stetson hat, two bags of groceries from the minimart next door, an Audi TT kicking gravel into Cashel Bay and heading down the mile of rocky track towards Ros Rua. For me behind binoculars, stretched along the dry stone wall, the music clinched it. Wired to the sky like summer smoke, a melody ascended, needle thin, undefined, above the low-pitched mossy roof into the afternoon. (I saw them wedged in primitive splendour: Bono, the Edge on a broken sofa; Mullen, Clayton, heads together, tracks mixed onto minidisk, a picture window open to the pale sun, the breathing sea). Stalked by gulls, mobbed by gorse, I crawled like a lone commando down where the fields broke cover over rocks, down where the swallows stitched the sky to water. Voices crooned in the telephone wires, a heartbeat away from the green front door. (Bono, The Edge, a bottle of Mouton Cadet blanc between them; Mullen trailing a pensive finger round the rim of a crystal glass, Clayton watching the bobbing seals in Bertraghboy Bay). And then the door swung wide and the music bloomed like a tin flower: Daniel O’ Donnell singing The Rose of Tralee. And a four-square farmer’s wife came stepping high over the tussocks, scarved and booted, ringing a bucket like a broken bell. And she’s singing too, singing in a wild soprano, keen as the edge of a spinning slate, plaiting her voice around O’Donnell’s skinny tenor, scattering the gulls and lifting a fishing heron out of the shallows and into the all-accommodating sky. Dick Jones |
If you have any comments on this poem, Dick Jones would be
pleased to hear them.
