(Post about the story ‘Poppyfields’, included in the Peacock Cloak collection. It was first published in Interzone.)
As I have said before, I find landfill sites and waste ground oddly fascinating.
With landfill sites it is the processes taking place beneath the ground that I find absorbing to think about, the slow breakdown of human refuse as it gradually finds its way back into mineral form. We tend to think of human rubbish as the enemy of nature, but of course in another sense it is part of nature. Plastic bags or linnets. Nature, like Poppyfields, doesn’t care.
* * *
I named Angus Wendering after the poem by W.B.Yeats, ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’. (There is a musical setting of it by Christy Moore, which is actually where I encountered it).
I went down to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
I cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And hooked a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
When something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded in the brightening air.
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and hold her hand;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
Beautiful in a way, but it’s a dangerous dream, that dream of a magical, glimmering girl, a dream that can lead to cruel, dark places.
It’s interesting how the poem both delivers and does not deliver a resolution in its final lines. The poem itself reaches those golden and silver apples, plucks them and gathers them in, but it leaves Aengus still searching for them. He’ll never find them of course.