Sunday, December 13, 2020

Part of us dies

 

The fields told their stories

over the walls, through the thorns;

whispered their secrets to silver roads

who, humming like telegraph wires,

carried them to the neighbouring parishes.


Stories that hung dancing on rowan trees

or carried lanterns into the earth;

some were left to simmer in springs

or sent burbling down into silt-filled ponds;

many still mark the earth like ringworm.


Ours, the kith and kin of Garrypat, Bully’s Acre,

Páirc an Easa; that mosaic of landscape,

familar, once, as our parents’ faces,

whose stories, our stories, are no longer heard

but are lost under the roar of passing traffic.

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