Healing Waters: Two Irish Thoughts

We can make our minds so like

still water that beings gather

about us to see, it may be,

their own images, and so live for a

moment with a clearer, perhaps even

with a fiercer life because of our

quiet.

W. B. Yeats

An Tobar/The Well

"'Twill put a stir in you, and life,"

says old Bridget, spark in her eyes

proffering a bowl of spring-water

from the purest well in Gleann an Átha,
a well that was tended tastily

from generation to generation, the precious

heritage of the household

snugly sheltered in a nook,

a ditch around it for protection,

a flagstone on its mouth.

When I was growing up

here in the early 'sixties

there wasn't a house in the neighbourhood

without its like,

for everyone was proud then

of how wholesome and pure

they kept the family well:

they wouldn't let it become murky or slimy

and at the first traces of red-rust

it was bailed-out with a tin bucket

then purified every season with kiln-lime.

Lively, living water, pellucid spring-water

gushed forth from our family well.

In tin-cans and pitchers

they drew it daily

and in the devouring thirst

of sweltering summer

it slaked and cooled them

in field and bog.

It was a tonic, too,

that made them throb with delight

and for their ablutions

it served from cradle to grave.

But, this long time, piped water from distant hills

sneaks into every kitchen

on both sides of the glen;

water spurts from a tap,

mawkish, without sparkle,

zestless as slops

and among my people

the springwell is being forgotten.

"'Tis hard to find a well nowadays",

says Bridget filling the bowl again.

"They're hidden in rushes and grass,

choked by green scum and ferns,

but, despite the neglect,

they've lost none of their true mettle.

Seek out your own well, my dear,

for the age of want is near:

There will have to be a going back to sources."

Cathal Ó Searcaigh

translated from the Irish by Gabriel Fitzmaurice

Happy Saint Patrick's Day, my friends.