By Conor Mc Donnell

 I sat all morning in the college sick bay

Counting bells knelling classes to a close.

The opening lines of Seamus Heaney’s Mid-Term Break might have been written by any one of many writers, they seem simple enough, but this poem was the first to make a meaningful mark on me some twenty-one years into my conscious existence. Reading and studying curriculum poetry during my teenage schooling is something I have no memory of. 

In school, I was force-fed poetry. It was recited in classrooms by checked-out teachers who paced back and forth across well-worn linoleum floors in the (Catholic) Marist Brothers Secondary School I attended from 1982 to ‘88. Rote metrics such as theme, rhyme, meter and imagery were dissected, discussed and lionized as the building blocks of ‘best-bet’ essays tailored to elicit top grades in exams. Nowadays, that sounds more like, and was essentially taught like, math: rules were there to be observed. The poet had obeyed them during the poem’s creation therefore, all discussion henceforth should be based on applying (without truly explaining) said rules within which to frame the creative process as opposed to exploring the varying effects certain poems have exerted upon generations of readers.

In September 1988, I entered medical school at the ridiculous age of 17, and so began a poetry-free four-year run until Spring of 1992. The early ‘90s marked a personal enlightenment through discovery of non-mainstream music: not so much singles by R.E.M., The Cure, New Order or Depeche Mode, which were already on my radar, but instead an underbelly of deep-cuts gouged by The Pixies, Husker Du, Joy Division, Jane’s Addiction and more; the acid summer of The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Charlatans, hell, even Jesus Jones and The Soup Dragons were fun for a couple of weeks. Summer nights swam in Manchester’s Hacienda with pupils the size of dinner plates, all of which further prepped me for future talismans like Sonic Youth, Massive Attack, Nine Inch Nails, and, personal godhead, My Bloody Valentine. My ears newly open, my wider radar was re-calibrated to receive so much more.

*

 One afternoon, in the Spring of 1992, I was loitering in the University English Department waiting for a lady-friend to finish a tutorial. Glancing over the notice boards I began to read a poem printed and butterflied behind the glass. I still don’t know why I continued to read once I realized the damn thing was a poem. I also don’t truly reeeeally remember reading it, not that first time, because as I finished my friend came out and found me standing alone in the corridor, tears streaming down my face: no man-heaves, no embarrassing snot, just two wet contrails from lid to jaw. Her initial alarm soon disappeared once she realized I was crying over something I’d read on a wall. I pointed to the page while wiping my nose and we stood there awhile, re-reading in a rare silence.

*

On occasion since then I have argued “to the pain” about Mid-Term Break with writers and academics alike. During my second poetry seminar as a student (2014), I argued with Catherine Graham and a classroom of women; it’s not important that they were women, more that I was the only man in a poetry class arguing Mid-Term Break was a poem infused with an invisible anger.

Mid-Term Break describes the funeral of Seamus Heaney’s baby-brother a few months after Heaney had left home to attend secondary school. The opening lines, the couplet at the top of this chapter, describe the solitary aftermath following his removal from class to be told the terrible news. Then,

At two o’clock our neighbours drove me home

whereupon Heaney paints a maddeningly accurate picture of almost every Irish funeral I have ever attended: maddening to the extent of how untold generations of Irish men and women have accepted (the older ones continue to accept) devastating moments such as those described by Heaney as, ‘His will’ or ‘the way things are’:

… And tell me they were ‘sorry for my trouble’.

… And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

A Hard Blow. A four-year old child was hit and killed by a car:

No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

 Like many fathers in rural Ireland in the mid-20^th century, Heaney’s own was not convinced of the merits of an education beyond early teen hood. There was land to farm, mouths to feed, and it wasn’t the done thing thereabouts: if anything, it suggested an arrogance of sorts, an attitude of being ‘better than’. On the other hand, Heaney’s mother insisted on higher education not only to develop her son’s obvious talents but also as a way of getting him out, prompting him to make something more of himself. In 1992, I was unaware that Heaney was considered Nobel laureate material. I knew nothing of value about poetry or poets; however, I did know a thing or two about that life-or-death feeling of needing to break free and live my own life: I tasted it in lines like:

Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,

Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.

I knew exactly how angry she was, and why. She fought for her children to ‘have’, to be ‘more’, and was furious at such glum acceptances of a horrific young death: the misfortune of her little lad wandering out the door unseen at just the wrong moment; such terrible serendipity tottering into the road as a car sped carelessly by. Nothing about this was a ‘trouble’, the troubles weren’t even a defined thing yet where Heaney grew up; and the only hard blow was the impact of speeding bumper on fragile skull:

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple

The blow to the family was devastating and no-one would escape that icy-grip of sudden loss – those moments before we have even accepted the loss of a child, never mind begun to grieve.

*

I witnessed such grief as an early teen; a boy from school (also called Conor) was crushed by a bus, hired to bring students from our school to a Sunday football match in Dublin. Instead, just as he tried to board, the driver took off with Conor’s school-tie caught in the automatic doors. Conor tried to keep up while others yelled for the driver to stop but the boy tripped and went under the front wheel. Boys my age saw it happen, watched it happen, heard the moment his hard blow landed: the sound of it something they would never share beyond their own stubborn memory.

When I arrived to school the next morning some of my friends were shocked to see me because they thought that I had died. They didn’t know any other Conors and the name of the unfortunate child was already widely known. I myself had met Conor a few times, he had sort of begun to take me under his wing and introduce me as ‘the little fella from first year that can run rings round anyone with a ball at his feet.’ A name that stuck for years:

‘lil fella.’

 Conor’s funeral was a devastating mid-winter-morning crash course in human wreckage. I broke down at the end of the ceremony when the coffin was carried out of the church: the boy I knew was in that box; parts of him flattened.

 The stiff men that bore his coffin were silent and damp. But the women: his mother, her sister, the women trying to hold them up as they slowly followed the box? I had never seen grief, pain, this raw. His younger brother, in his father’s grasp – the same age as my own brother – in an ill-fitting little suit, likely bought a year or two earlier for his first holy communion. As part of the school choir I had kept my eyes down throughout and sung into my hymn-sheets but I made the mistake of watching as the procession passed our pew. I had failed to appreciate almost all other heads bowed, most shoulders hunched, some heaving, and as in the oldest stories that tell of Medusa, Lot’s wife, Sisyphus & Eurydice, I glanced and everything changed forever.

 We had lost family members of our own in previous years but I had been protected from funerals until now. Rather than turn to stone or salt, I saw instead the undiluted concentrated form of grief that had settled upon my father after his brother’s suicide, my mother since the loss of her own mother. I stopped singing as my own tears began to fall; continued to mouth meaningless words as our choir-master conducted & whipped us along. From a familiar vantage point of porous visibility, unnoticed silence, I felt the events of that morning and previous years slam together into an awful moment of … for want of a better phrase, cloying finality. That’s it, he’s done and gone, and his people are f#*@ed good and proper. 

I, too, was done. I stopped lip-syncing and dropped back into the cold wooden pew. Someone tried to lift me back up by hooking under my armpit before realizing, what’s the point? I spilled my tears, unable to wash away the image of his brother, his mother, then heard a woman behind me say:

“Did you hear they found cigarettes in his coat? Smoking he was. Already turned bad … in some ways it spared his mother from worse to come.”

Worse to come. 

I mean, what the hell.

Better be dead than a disappointment.

Better be crushed by a bus than grow up difficult.

Easier to help a woman over her grief than the shame brought upon her name.

 When we were finally allowed to leave the church, above the sobbing and coughing, I could hear the old men gathered at the door primed to shake hands and pay tribute:

“Hard blow.

Terrible loss.

Sorry for your trouble.”

 These words do not soothe or salve in those moments, and while charitable in intent they always grate whenever I hear them. I am glad, however, to have overheard the women inside because I have never forgotten since how cruel people can be in the midst of allegedly showing support. Being seen had another meaning back then (akin to turning up due to some sense of duty) quite different to how many apply the phrase now.

*To offer some explanation as to why you’ve just been exposed to so much swearing and anger in relation to funerals, I am a true (95%+) Enneagram Number Four personality type. Fours are defined by the belief that they are different from other people, and by their feelings of envy for what others have. Fours are ‘heart-types’ and have the sense that something is missing from their lives. We worry that we will never have the happiness other people experience and at our core, we Type-Fours yearn for that magical deep connection that will make us feel whole and accepted. We also tend to be highly altruistic & empathetic and often have an intuitive sense of what other people need and want. Armed with this knowledge, we sometimes give too much of ourselves in our attempts to connect. Anger is also a core emotion, which is not to say my responses are angry, no, but I am prone to making decisions based on emotion and if / when my emotions are tweaked in the wrong way my internal response to events like the comments overheard at the funeral originate internally, innately, as anger, but more often than not evolve to manifest and externalize as sadness, disappointment, futility, anxiety, tears. So, when reading Mid-Term Break for the first time(s) angry memories re-emerged as tears, tears wed to language – tiny details barely noticed and for the longest time buried in lieu of future translation.

Counting bells knelling

 …

angry tearless sighs

…

a poppy bruise on his left temple

Those tiny details worked me over, primed me for a moment yet to arrive, standing there in a leather jacket with pimples and dirty hair.

*

My own brother is four years younger than me. As children, whenever we went outside to play I was inevitably charged with his safety. I always walked on the road-side of the pavement so as to keep him safe from imagined cars that might lurch and mount the kerb; better they flatten me and leave him intact ‘cos there was no way I was going home and facing my parents without him.

Better to be dead.

Those of us who are older siblings will know what I’m talking about, we’ve all done the same.

 I scanned the closing lines of Mid-Term Break and the poem seemed to accelerate beyond my control as I watched, not read, events unfold:

He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.

Four

His brother

My brother: four years

He wasn’t there to protect him

He left, he went away for school

I have done the same

The closing stanza flattened me:

He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.

No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

Sweet Jesus … one line left:

A four-foot box, a foot for ever year.

Wait. What?

The child is lying in a four-foot box, a cot

No, a four-foot box, a coffin, and

A foot for every year

Here come the tears again.

How the hell do writers do that?

Even now, how the hell does a dead man writing about a long-dead child still do that to me?

Every time?

How can he possibly have known?

The answer? It’s Chinatown, Jake. It’s poetry, Jim, but not as I knew It.

 I have read most everything by Heaney these thirty years since: his poetry, his prose, his critical essays, his interviews. I forever lament the fact that during my time in University I did not attend readings by Heaney, Allen Ginsberg, and Czeslaw Milosz. At the time, I didn’t know any better and had other things to do, concerts to attend, women to meet, bad books to read. Earlier this year while re-reading some of Heaney’s essays, I came across the following quote:

I began as a poet when my roots were crossed with my reading

That afternoon in 1992, on a corridor in front of a peeling noticeboard, my own roots finally crossed paths with what I was reading. I guess that’s how he did that to me, did that for me, he knew there’d be people like me who would need to be told we all feel how we feel because of who we are and what we know.

*

Footnote: for those who disagree, vehemently, about my conviction that a cuddly old poet like Heaney could have carried angry energies, a quote from his short essay on Osip Mandelstam:

“if a poet must turn his resistance into an offensive, he should go for a kill and be prepared, in his life and with his work, for the consequences” 

*

From the first time I wrote this section through many edits to right now, umpty-thousand feet above the earth flying home to Ireland for the first time in three years, my chest shrinks and tightens. My breath disappears and my shoulder blades clench every time, as if in anticipation of an awful moment to come. I want to say here, maybe to you but probably just to myself: this kind of pain never fully goes away. I think it turns to other things such as energies that drive us, the love we give or withhold, our fears, regrets, outbursts and angers: but it’s always there. This acceptance helps me make something else of it, maybe something worthwhile? 

Despite my anxieties, I am looking forward to going home for winter break this Christmas, 2022, some thirty years after my first encounter with Mid-Term Break.

*

 (This essay is an excerpt from a completed manuscript, currently titled Steady State, which details the difficulties of balancing creativity, anxiety, and a frontline career in high acuity medicine.)