Lighting The Dark

an Advent calendar for tender times

✨ Welcome and thank you for joining me on this journey to find glimpses of light in dark times. If this is your first email, you can read an introduction to the project here and find links to catch up with any posts you’ve missed at the end of this email.

We are in the second week of Advent, burning a candle for peace alongside the candle for hope we it in week 1. Peace is the theme running through all this week’s offerings. ✨

A few days ago, I wrote about my struggle to reconcile how so much beauty and so much horror can co-exist in the world. Today I bring you a poem that captures this impossibility in just a few lines. It’s by the Northern Irish poet Michael Longley and is one of the most poignant yet understated anti-war poems I know.

THE ICE-CREAM MAN

Rum and raisin, vanilla, butterscotch, walnut, peach:
You would rhyme off the flavours. That was before
They murdered the ice-cream man on the Lisburn Road
And you bought carnations to lay outside his shop.
I named for you all the wild flowers of the Burren
I had seen in one day: thyme, valerian, loosestrife,
Meadowsweet, tway blade, crowfoot, ling, angelica,
Herb robert, marjoram, cow parsley, sundew, vetch,
Mountain avens, wood sage, ragged robin, stitchwort,
Yarrow, lady's bedstraw, bindweed, bog pimpernel.

Michael Longley

The poem was written after one of almost two thousand civilian deaths that took place during the long sectarian war in Northern Ireland known as The Troubles.

On a Tuesday night in October of 1988, two men walked into a shop on the Lisburn Road in Belfast, ordered ice-cream and then shot the man behind the counter as he turned around to serve them. They were IRA gunmen and they were never arrested for the murder.

Michael Longley lived near the shop and would often take his young daughter for an ice cream there. Like so many children, she could remember and recite all the flavours.

On the day of the murder, Longley has been out botanising in the Burren, a wild landscape on the West Coast of Ireland. When he returned home, his daughter told him what had happened and said that she had used her pocket money to buy a bunch of carnations to lay on the pavement outside the shop. “I almost sleep-walked into this poem,” Longley remembers. “I made a kind of metaphorical wreath of the flower names in my notebook.”

Some years later Longley was reading his poem on the radio and then received an unexpected letter:

Dear Mr. Longley,

My daughter bought your book Gorse Fires for me after hearing you on the radio. Your verse on the ice-cream man was clear to us, who you were writing about. But I do appreciate very much that someone outside our family circle remembered my son John. The fact that there were 21 flavors of ice cream in the shop, and you wrote 21 flowers, was coincidental. I do bless you for your kind thoughts, and may God bless you.

Sincerely, the ice-cream man’s mother, Rosetta Larmour.

Longley has described that letter as “almost my most precious possession’.

Like so many people I’m struggling to find words adequate to respond to the loss of so much life and the shattering of so many childhoods in Israel-Palestine. Sometimes the senseless horrors of war just can’t be rationalised. All we can do is keep a list and refuse to forget. A list of lost joys. A list of lost lives. A list of the living things that can still bring us hope.

If this poem moved you then do watch this short video of Michael Longley reading it out near the Lisburn Road. And if you can make time this week for something really nourishing, I recommend this beautiful conversation between Michael Longley and Krista Tippett.

Thank you for being here with open hearts each day.

Sophie ✨

Lighting The Dark is an online Advent Calendar compiled by Sophie Howarth. If you would like to invite family and friends to join you in receiving it, the sign-up link is here.

If you have just arrived, welcome and thank you for sharing in the mystery and possibility of Advent with me. You can find an introduction to the project on December 1 and catch up with posts sent on December 2, December 3, December 4, December 5, December 6, December 7, December 8, December 9, December 10, December 11 and December 12.