Poetry Ireland had a competition for Joyce Cycle: Love your Bike Competition.
When I tried to write about bicycles I am back again at my two teacher school where the young master always seemed to have a sore head and beat children badly and many children had no one to help them with their lessons at home.
Many of these children came in their bare feet to school and many younger than me have died young. I have here two poems already published in my earlier books. I feel for the bus drivers as they have no space to pull in when Pearse St. fills up with bicycles but they are so careful, I really admire them.
Mary Guckian
Bicycles in the 1940’s
Well worn and rusty,
Raleigh bicycles got us
to our destinations
but pot holed roads gave
us loads of punctures.
We loved getting away from
the farm, cycling to the store
with eggs or taking lunches
to the bog during turf cutting.
Errands for my Mother
at Carrick town, visiting
our cousins or a spin on
Sundays with school pals.
When the young master
came to teach in the
two teacher school
I was a mere two years old,
later the eldest of seven.
The local priest asked
my Mother to give him
lodgings until he could
afford a bicycle and go
and live in the local town.
He never slapped me
but I cried a lot, watching
all the children suffer.
The boys loved to pull
the saddle of his bicycle
apart, it was their only
way of getting back
at him as he ruined
their hands with whining
wallops from sally rod
Mary Guckian
Parked Bicycles
Surrounded by parked
bicycles from Barrow Street
to Grand Canal Dock,
Dublin City Council is
sending out messages –
keep cars off the road,
leave space for cyclists
and get them pedalling
wearing helmets and
live a healthy lifestyle.
Pearse Street gets crowded
with cyclists criss crossing
at every junction, baskets
full of documents or food.
Bus drivers need acrobatic
senses as they manage
to find parking space at
the Bus Stops, allowing
their passengers alight
safely onto the footpaths.
Mary Guckian
Trace Worlds by Liffey Waters
But what I wondered was
how you calculated
distances, knew
the seas sailed
before these boats anchored,
read oceans
in some sailor’s eyes.
You could decipher ensigns
too, colours
daubed on the planet’s
hard waters
now flying
above the familiar Liffey.
And you judged
the freight of nations,
how sundry galleys shone
in the sun of Trinidad
or Tobago, how this ship
or that navigated
an icy North Sea.
Reckoning the saving
worth of beacons
was another calling,
or approving a good eye-splice
like the ones you included
in my skipping ropes.
Dead ahead
in your own space,
you were your father’s child
with the ocean’s roar
in your ears,
your great
grandmother’s cutter
barely below the waterline,
of your memory,
and the smell
of her small harbour
at low tide,
sun sinking.
Marie MacSweeney,
Drogheda
