The Clay Pipes

By: Cathal O Searcaigh

You won’t be the one to turn away when death

rolls in towards you like the ocean.

You will hold to your steadfast gaze,

as it comes tiding in, all plash and glitter

from the rim of eternity.

You will keep your head.

You will come to your senses again as it

foams over the ridged beaches of your brain

and you will take it all in

and know it completely:

you will be a child again, out on the strand

at Magheraroarty, your body

abandoned altogether

to the lift of the Atlantic.

But before you went the whole way then away

into nothingness, you would touch the bottom.

And this will be what happens to you here:

you’ll go through a black hole of initiation,

then reach the land of the living;

but the seal of the brine will be on you forever

and you’ll have depth as a person:

you’ll walk from danger of death into the truth.

Here is the best image I can find:

you are like the forest people of Columbia

I read about in the library,

a tribe who smoke clay pipes, coloured pipes

that used to have to be made from this one thing:

basketfuls of clay

scooped out in fatal danger

in enemy country, in a scaresome place

full of traps and guards and poisoned arrows.

According to this article, they believe

that the only fully perfect pipes

are ones made out of the clay

collected under such extreme conditions.