Iffy/ Jim

[dedalus]

Biddy Maloney down the road had a cat called Iphigenia, Iffy, and they were a bit of a literary family and not above letting you know it. There's a fox in the story as well, young Seamus, known as Jimmy, whose poor father, Pronsias (Francis) was eaten by the hounds of the wicked English when they were still hulloing hulloing about the place which was before the homemade landmines went in, the kind your granny could set off with a little red button. That was great craic altogether with everyone's granny blowing the shite out of the local landlords until there were none of them left at all at all. So we sent over a message to ask would they not send a few more across to us, but they said NO, in a rather bad-tempered way, and that's when we stopped paying rents and the like and it was a very depressing time altogether with no landlords shooting up into the air. Up in Dublin they call it the War of Independence but down here we called it Granny's Revenge. They were all raped as serving girls for this is what the English did and some of these old biddies (let's be fair) enjoyed the experience tremendously because if you don't ask for it, it's not your fuckin fault. Some of them were faultless 28 or 40 times before marrying 84-year-old psychopathic local farmers after which they glommed up the land when their husbands laid down on the road for a rest and got run over by the Clonakilty bus or else went off in the hills to talk to Lugh or Emer or Mananaan and got struck with lightning bolts for their pains. You don't want to be talking to ancient Celtic gods with short attention spans. Annyway, after the Red Button revolution didn't all the grannies die, one after another, all fuckin dead. God be with them, acushla mo chrói. Sure there was no more excitement, do you see? They had no interest in sex whatsoever, the average age being 85, and with no more landlords to blow to kingdom come, sure, what was the point of living? They died and the fairies came in. This aroused the community because the fairies wear very short dresses, stop growing at the age of 20, and look like Kylie Minogue on a very very good day.

 

Kylie says Hello ... what the hell am I doing in this poem?

Well, things happened. There's an awful lot of good-looking kids skateboarding around the neighbourhood.

 

But there was always Iphigenia and Seamus. Never mind the grannies and the fairies and the English. These are passing things. So is Kylie. The fields and the forests and the sky are forever.

 

Iphigenia was restless. She was lepping about like Biddy Maloney's goat, with her tail lashing hither and yon, the divil between us and all harm. Will yeh get off the fffn, (cough) table! Another cuppa? Yerra, Jayz and wouldn't I love one? O the split yellow eyes on you, you little so-and-so. Wait till I get you home! Tis in with the hens you'll be put waitin on Jimmy the Fox who'll come dashing in with the darkness of the night upon him and all the outraged hennies will be going chook-chook-chook and won't he be taking you away to Las Vegas, girl, or to some other strange and peculiar foreign part? Tis the long hard stroke of a father's hand you be needing, gerrl, but sure Jimmy will put the restraint upon yeh, and he but a young lad but the true son of his blessed father, God be good to him, taken up in the Hunt by the blashted English, God's curse on them for seven generations, and may their childer come out in spots and boils, but isn't he the good-lookin buckaroo with his eyes the like of diamonds and the flahhhoo of the red hair carefully set down, pomaded and ribboned in the way of a ginttleman, a squireen of the Old Blood, Dear God and Holy Mary, (ahh, would you stop your oul gallop?) Well then, sorr, like the Dana? The Dé Danaan, them as what's gone below the ground?

[Tinker]

Hi Brendan, This was interesting, I enjoyed it though I found the dialect sometimes difficult to follow. A prose poem is tricky. I never know how to differentiate between whether I read this as prose or poem. Although I don't know if it makes much of a difference. The form is a bit dense and with the difficulty of the language I think written in poetic lines may have made the read easier.

 

~~Tink