Station Island – the Sequence III

The pilgrim has gone to one of Station Island’s ‘beds’. His initial humble posture (I knelt)is followed by a pause: Hiatus.. This is not prayer but rather obedience of the protocols of the pilgrimage, a ‘pervasive element’ from Heaney’s Catholic upbringing. The mindset (Habit’s afterlife) has transported him back to bead clicks and the murmurs/ from inside confessionals. Textures and odours have invaded his sense-memory: the invasiveness of waning candles insinuating slight/ intimate smells of wax at body heat. Expectancy (an active wind-stilled hush) and a marine association (the sea-shell held to the ear in which the jugular hiss of blood-flow resembles that of the sea) seem to herald a magic happening: the ocean stopped … a tide rested and […]