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.