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Kim Taplin

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Hungry hill

“They’ve phoned to tell you that your uncle’s died.
I’m sorry to bring bad news,” said the farmer’s wife.

It was not my funeral -
not, I mean, in my family,
and I went for fellowship but sulkily,
prickling in borrowed clothes -
and listened in disbelief while a young man
holding back his tears with difficulty
spoke of how his grandfather
had reduced him to tears (and not him alone)
because he’d played the wrong card at Bridge.
And saw that I’d been wrong about love,
had probably been on the wrong track
all my life.

So on the day after two surreal flights
from Cork to Stansted and back
for the last day of our Irish holiday,
when the sun shone the most of the whole
fortnight and we set out to climb Hungry Hill,
I went up my first ever mountain
foot after foot with no trouble at all
feeling a kind of lightness, an emptiness
clean as the ravens’ whose dark brown voices
were all that broke the silence of the stones
and the thousand open mouths of lesser sundew
in the boggy dips.

Someone in one of Theodore Powys’s stories
says ‘It is a world of wanting’ and I
speak of this, this world and its hunger,
how there is a huge craving
besides that for potatoes.

Some say the hill is properly named Angry
and others again say that it should be ‘Hill
of Envy’ from the Gaelic
and it seems to me that these are all one
because for a short while, as we sat at the top
and looked at Bantry Bay and all round
under a blue heaven, I wasn’t hungry.

 

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