The Blink of an Eye

mayflies, solstice . . .

In July I walked across Ireland, from Roscommon to Dublin in 4 days. After going through my notes and photographs I wrote something which I hope will see the light of day in 2025. Writing this brought be back to the river Inny in Ballymahon and the sight of mayflies swarming around at dusk. While I believe that anything, no matter how mundane, can be the subject of a poem, the mayfly cannot but call to mind a perennial theme in poetry: life and its brevity. The mayfly can live on the surface of the water for maybe a year, in its nymph state. But as a mature adult it lives for around a day. Born without a digestive system, the mayfly will die of starvation if it manages to avoid being eaten by birds and trout. It flitters about, reproduces, expires.

I am nearing the end of Dennis O’Driscoll’s The Outnumbered Poet, a collection of essays, and I have loved every minute of it. It was his long essay on Michael Hartnett that led me to the penultimate poem in Hartnett’s ‘Collected Poems’. A farewell, not just to poetry, but, perhaps, to everything. Here is ‘The Blink of an Eye’:

I see the morning star 
      through my childhood skylight 
and close my eyes and dream for fifty years, 
      re-living every set-back, every high-light;

I open my eyes and there’s the Evening Star. 
      And suddenly it’s Twilight. 

As O’Driscoll noted, by coincidence or not, this is very similar to Salvatore Quasimodo’s most celebrated poem, ‘Ed è subito sera’. Here’s my version in its entirety:

Each alone on the heart of the earth 
pierced by a ray of sun 
and suddenly it’s evening

When I was researching the mayfly, I found these lines from the Epic of Gilgamesh. They were written on clay tablets around 3,600 years ago, surely the earliest extant reference to the mayfly.

Ever do we build our households,
Ever do we make our nests,
Ever do brothers divide their inheritances,
Ever do feuds arise in the land.
Ever the river has risen and brought us the flood
The Mayfly floating on the water
On the face of the sun its countenance gazes,
Then all of a sudden nothing is there.

Hartnett, Quasimodo, the anonymous author of Gilgamesh… They knew one thing. Light. It doesn’t last long. Enjoy it. Happy solstice.

From last year:

As always, the best way to support me is by buying my book. Available here.