To Change a Lightbulb

Here's a poem by me that I posted before, but that I'm posting again now.

I worked on it for ages, trying to stitch together all of my thoughts and feelings about the loss of oral lore, the ties that bind generations, the presence and absence of historical memory, and the lived experience of recent decades. I was quite pleased with the outcome. Of course, it sank without trace.

My favourite of my own poems are "think pieces" which involve a solitary character doing something fairly mundane and expressing the thoughts that go through their head. They are strongly influenced by Philip Larkin poems such as "Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album" and "Church Going".

Maybe I asked for it, giving it the title that I did, but it seemed the best possible title. I've smuggled in some of my favourite words and phrases, such as "phantasmal", "winter's tale". And I'm proud of the last line.

To Change a Lightbulb by Maolsheachlann Tiernan Finbarr Ó Ceallaigh

Not even looking up, he flicks the switch.
The room lights for a moment, then goes back
To evening gloom.
He mutters to himself: "Son of a bitch..."
Then stomps off to another room
Irked that his train of thought was thrown off track.

He reappears, still cursing, with a new
Sixty watt bayonet lightbulb in his hand.
He drags a chair
To the centre of the room, and in a few
More moments, the new bulb is hanging there
Waiting to light the room at his command.

Still standing on the chair, he finds himself
Staring out at the night's phantasmal fall.
Out of the past
A scene comes, from some high-up mental shelf;
Him and his father, laughing, as they cast
A host of shadow puppets on the wall

One power-cut night some fifty years ago.
He'd thought of that, in college, when he'd heard
Of Plato's Cave.

If life was only one long puppet show
Was that so bad? Nostalgia's balmy wave
Sweeps over him, and hits him unprepared.

Why had he never shadow-puppeted
For Liam or Deirdre, down through all those years?
Guilt seizes him:
He pushes back. If that's the worst a kid
Has to complain about... But in the dim
And dying light a vast assembly nears

Of long-dead relatives he never knew.
He thinks of them, filling whole nights like this
With winter tales
And ballads, legends, riddles, all that grew
From fire and shade. His cynicism fails
Faced with this world he never thought to miss.

A few stray ghosts were all he'd ever known
Lingering by the camp-fire, long ago.
Where were they now?
Had that all-seeing eye, the mobile phone,
Spared any? Could the internet allow
A single local legend skin and bone?

A sort of strangled panic fills his soul.
Was it past helping? There was, after all,
Still candlelight.
But that was crazy-- time would only roll
One way. It was futility to fight
That conqueror, the white switch on the wall.

He steps down to the floor. They start to fade--
The all-too-quiet dead, the mute banshee,
The ghosts of ghosts,
As sad as a tired child, the games all played,
He hits the switch, and all that fading host
Are gone. The light falls on solidity.