The Cannonball
Innocent even if it took the head off someone – a poor
anonymous soldier, a wealthy nobleman
or landowner, maybe even the Marquis de St Ruth himself
in full regalia spurring forward his white charger:
“They are beaten, gentlemen, let us drive them back
to the walls of Dublin.” Local people still echo
his ‘last words’ – but whether this cannonball
carried his cranium or not, it went to ground, lay for centuries
undisturbed while the war-making moved elsewhere
and the mechanisms of killing progressed. Did a stream
uncover it, a spade or plough? I picture a farmer
scooping it up with a sigh or a grunted “What
in hell’s name?” Its heaviness surprises him before thoughts
of the battle – Aughrim, 1691 – occur, and he
clutches it as though about to make a sporting play, clear
his lines, or kick the winning score. Rust
grazes his fingertips; he dunks the miserable sphere
in a rain barrel, scrubs it with a terrylene towel, shows it
to family and friends, eventually leaves it
to rust again. Until, come to my keeping, it holds a door
open against the wind as bags of coal are hefted
through the house, or has me sighting inclines in a back-lane
game of bowls with my children. Two decades
it sits on my desk, a cumbersome paperweight, its surface
wearing a ‘bruise’ that won’t reveal the reason
behind it no matter how I tickle or trace. Some nights
it seems the devil’s bauble, others the mocking skull of Yorick,
most often the beryl of lethargy that spoils
my good intentions. And when, as if possessed of a secret,
glimmery, interior power, it rolls off, thumps
the floor, I wonder whether St Ruth might harrumph
at the notion of ‘sheets of poesie’ fluttering about a room,
or smile at the ‘shames’ that befall a cannonball.
But what keeps me reaching still, what finds me making,
is the beauty that perseveres despite the turn
for the worse the world seems always on the verge of taking.
- Patrick Deeley