I was reading in the Big Book – Baalam’s donkey,
Elisha and Naaman, the leper cured, and gratitude –
I thought of Jonah, my Bunnacurry mule, big and raw,
stubborn in hardship and unwilling, insistent
in calling out from his knowledge of the world, wise
in his own way, as Solomon. We stood together,
wearied, out on the wide spaces of the bogland,
honey-scent of heather on the breeze, in a quietude
that could be prayer. The high dome of the sky
was a mystic blue, and somewhere in the low growth
of rush and scraw, a pipit sang; beyond the ridge
of the low hills, the Atlantic Ocean sounded, its soft
and regular shushing of the breakers like a breathful
hymn of praise. It was as if we were standing, lone,
in the first church, we were the first worshippers, awed
and wordless. I had filled the salley creels on either
side of Jonah, from the footings dried in the sun
where the peat-thickened water wallowed dark
from the deep veins of earth, and we started back,
Jonah and I, good companions. The bog road
was rough with stone and sorrow, and we, Jonah
and I, moved in a slow, uncomely cosmic dance
of bemused fellowship. We stopped: I took two sods
from either creel and carried them, to ease his load,
thanking him and flinging away my stick; kindly
I laid my hand on the unshaven and twitching rump
and sensed the stone-like bones of his spine, then
we carried on, Jonah and I, towards our Nineveh.
John F Deane’s most recent collections are Naming of the Bones (Carcanet, 2021) and Darkness Between Stars (John F Deane and James Harpur, Irish Pages Press, 2022).
Elisha and Naaman, the leper cured, and gratitude –
I thought of Jonah, my Bunnacurry mule, big and raw,
stubborn in hardship and unwilling, insistent
in calling out from his knowledge of the world, wise
in his own way, as Solomon. We stood together,
wearied, out on the wide spaces of the bogland,
honey-scent of heather on the breeze, in a quietude
that could be prayer. The high dome of the sky
was a mystic blue, and somewhere in the low growth
of rush and scraw, a pipit sang; beyond the ridge
of the low hills, the Atlantic Ocean sounded, its soft
and regular shushing of the breakers like a breathful
hymn of praise. It was as if we were standing, lone,
in the first church, we were the first worshippers, awed
and wordless. I had filled the salley creels on either
side of Jonah, from the footings dried in the sun
where the peat-thickened water wallowed dark
from the deep veins of earth, and we started back,
Jonah and I, good companions. The bog road
was rough with stone and sorrow, and we, Jonah
and I, moved in a slow, uncomely cosmic dance
of bemused fellowship. We stopped: I took two sods
from either creel and carried them, to ease his load,
thanking him and flinging away my stick; kindly
I laid my hand on the unshaven and twitching rump
and sensed the stone-like bones of his spine, then
we carried on, Jonah and I, towards our Nineveh.
John F Deane’s most recent collections are Naming of the Bones (Carcanet, 2021) and Darkness Between Stars (John F Deane and James Harpur, Irish Pages Press, 2022).
