Wednesday, November 4, 2020

The Walls of Inis Oirr

Among Ireland's most beautiful and impressive sights are the limestone walls of Inis Oirr. Fields paved with  karst limestone cleared to a labyrinthine landscape that's just incredible to behold. The walls for the most part fall into two categories of construction: lace walls and Feiden walls. You can get a good description of these walls at https://www.amusingplanet.com/2015/04/the-stone-walls-of-ireland.html


The Walls of Inis Oirr


How these walls speak, like poetry, of the land and its people;

how carefully the stones, like words, chosen to fit,

how beautiful their construction, coloured to their place.

The stone that paved the fields, now brimming with sky;

the lace walls of Inis Oirr, nets for seaweed fertiliser,

alive with limestone clouds chasing powder blue patches

across stanzas laden with western light, air and water.

Or feiden walls with their tightly packed words leaning left,

then right; words rhyming with themselves and their landscape;

for all the world, like a singsong on a bus coming late-night from

the pub, as close to merry as ever a poem could ever be, and still

following the lilt of the land as Yeats might have dreamed it.


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