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Remembering Mayo




What does this land mean to me?

These are the grasses that my grandfathers knew

The gateways where they herded cattle 

Their ashplants thrashing on their quarters

The fields where they tended crops

Where they led horses  and

Whistled to the dogs.


Here, under the yew tree, 

My grandfather sheltered from the driving rain

Keeping the shivering hounds beneath

The belly of his horse 

Watching the mud ooze out from iron shoddings


Where the rasp of hemp 

Stung his hands and cut notches

Into his fingers

Making blood flow out along the reins

Ripping open hard and uncomplaining veins


The shoulders of his heavy jacket

Taking a weight of water

Seeping through the seams

Into his undershirt.


Along his mazard

Small rivers cross where razor’s 

Hurried track give it a path.


The wraithy hawthorns stand aligned

Defining the hedgerow

As he hefts huge stones and

Boulder ore to re-make the fallen wall.


Here he rested on a Summer’s even

Using the last light to roll a cigarette

And lean against his work for now.


Then he would have walked this road

And signaled his twilight salute to

The passing priest reddened on his bicycle.


Pausing, turning, to watch the prelate’s figure

Bare-headed in the thin, sharp, wetting rain

He tugged a toke and, drawing an imaginary bead

With a narrowed eye,

Pulled the stoppered cork from hip-flask home

And sucked down a burning gulp.


What does this land mean to me?

Land I hardly know

Where corncrake and haeferblaete*

Crack and boom the sky.

Where rivers of running mud clog the 

Ditches with their ceaseless flow


Here, where children 

Find a joy in ceaseless life

While parents 

Distracted with ceaseless care, 

Mark their cheeks with spider veins

Blasted by the wind.

Mothers reproduce, or halt it

Following the timeless path

To personal oblivion – 

A sacrificial eloquence.


The huge over-arching sky

Tumultuously growing from the west

Expends an ocean on the land


But here a hand-hold is made on life

Survival sends down roots.

A plain of yew trees

Signifying life and death

And life in death

And life through death.


Like the yew it broods inside itself

Sustaining in its final agonised shiver 

Another round of life.


And what does this land mean to me?


A wave, a tide, a washing-over

A Nile flooding from the sky

A past, a present

That flows everlastingly on the land

Entering the veins.


***



The agëd relict

Emerges from her lean-to

Tucked in beside the Abbey.


“The man with the fushker**?

I remember him well.

He used to visit many years ago.

Come along I’ll show you 

The grave.”


And, plucking out from underneath a bush

A rusting watering can, 

she shows us to the plot. 

In those days it was unmarked,


Long years later

I knew which one it was

Remembering the distinctive hoops

Of rusty wire around its edge.


She sprinkles holy water and we stood 

And said a decade of the rosary.


In Mayo, my father visited his ancestors.

In Mayo we bowed our heads and breathed a prayer.


In Mayo I was shown how to remember.


And now…

I am remembering, 

remembering.



*Bittern

**Whisker, beard.

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