Poem: A Sweet Bell Ringing, by Michael Coady

At the National Museum, Collins Barracks

Stooping towards the case that holds
the Easter flag unfurled over the GPO
I see myself reflected in the glass
and out of that recalling
the image of a girl who's kin,
dissolving and transposed

to a night in November 1915
when her father leads her on violin
into the song by Moore
telling of Lir's lonely daughter
at a Town Hall concert to send out
some Christmas comforts to the Western Front.

A frail girl singing in a minor key,
Annie Coady sends her song into the dark
above the gathered heads and hearts
of a town beside the Suir –

When will that day-star, mildly springing,
Warm our isle with peace and love?
When will heaven, its sweet bell ringing,
Call my spirit to the fields above?

2.
By chance she's in a Dublin hospital
as Easter's terrible beauty breaks,
the family in Tipperary frantic
for news of her to counter rumour
of revolution, German invasion,
the city shelled.

When Maytime mopping up is done
with firing squad, quicklime, Frongoch,
Annie is well enough to be sent
back home to Tipperary, her illness
gone to ground until she's nineteen

and then forever taken
from her brother's arms –
as he, who'll be my father,
will be from mine
in years to come.

3.
Here now and under glass,
mute eloquence of object:
the flag of the republic
fashioned by the shirt-maker
Mary Shannon in the co-operative
at Liberty Hall; on Connolly's orders
hoisted above the GPO
as Pearse proclaimed the words below,

taken by the British
when Easter Week seemed done
then after fifty years returned
from the Imperial War Museum –

part torn but larger than imagined
and of a stronger weave,
Irish Republic lettered in white and orange
on a vibrant ground of emerald green.

A photograph beside it here
has a score of British officers
at ease in swagger sticks
and arrogance of empire
that outflanks the setting sun

posing with the rebel flag
in Sackville Street, on the plinth
of a new monument repudiating
behind their unseeing heads
the right of any man to fix a boundary
to the march of a nation.

There at Parnell's feet of bronze
imperial victors of the hour
frozen by the lens
in black and white
a century ago
look towards the unformed future,

brandishing insurgent green
in mock-ritual tableau
more prescient of what's to come
than they could know.

4.
I am of that future
in the here and now that finds me
gazing through the glass,
and all it gathers in around
the woven cloth on show –

those dead imperial soldiers posing
live with Mary Shannon's flag
that survived all; the haunting
cadence of Moore's song
that tells of swan and star,
transfiguration, love,

and my father's sister Annie
long gone although still young
and smiling from the frame
by the doorway in our hall –

a little life unsung,
collateral to the
General Post Office,
the river Suir,
the Somme.

Michael Coady’s works include One Another and Going by Water (Gallery Press). He has won the O’Shaughnessy Poetry Award and Patrick Kavanagh Prize