Letting Go

The concept of ‘letting go’ is one that has been very much on my mind, of late, but I have been thinking about it in relation to people, memories ~ things human, in other words ~ as opposed to inanimate things.

However, I seem to have been photographing a lot of  abandoned  ‘things’ of late and then today I was leafing through a wonderful collection of Irish Poems, selected by the great Michael Longley.  I was a little shocked, though I shouldn’t have been, to find that I had earmarked this  thought-provoking poem by Michael Coady, who is from Carrick-on-Suir, a town which has a foot in both Co. Tipperary and Co. Waterford.

Letting Go

I love the abandon

of abandoned things

 

the harmonium surrendering

in a churchyard in Aherlow,

the hearse resigned to nettles

behind a pub in Carna,

the tin dancehall possessed 

by convolvulus in Kerry,

the living room that hosts 

a tree in south Kilkenny.

 

I sense a rapture

in deserted things

 

washed-out circus posters

derelict on gables,

lush forgotten sidings

of country railway stations,

bat droppings profligate

on pew and font and lectern,

the wedding dress a dog 

has nosed from a dustbin.

 

I love the openness

of things no longer viable,

I sense their shameless

slow unbuttoning:

the implicit nakedness

there of the taking,

the surrender to the dance

of breaking and creating.

 

(Michael Coady included in  20th-Century Irish Poems Selected by Michael Longley, 2002, Faber and Faber:London)

The most recent photograph of an ‘abandoned thing’ that I took was this seat at a falling-down thatched pub on the road between Michael Coady’s  Carrick-on-Suir and my home town of  Tramore. It has been haunting me as I would so love to know about the people who sat on it; the stories and gossip it heard …..

The Old Seat

I’m beginning to wonder now if we can ever really separate ‘things’ from ‘people.’ What do you reckon?