Remembering

A lot has been written on the subject of the Irish famine; most of what’s needed to be said has been said. However, when I found myself digging potatoes in water-logged soil beneath the Bluestacks, gathering up marble-sized potatoes; I couldn’t but be reminded of the value even these had for families whose survival depended on ground such as this. 

Hard to appreciate, but the span of two just lifetimes (by today’s standards) would land us right back into the middle of those years, and hard to credit also, that affluence and starvation still live cheek by jowl today. 

Remembering 

In November, this charcoal month of sagging

clouds slung low between granite mountains,

while the trap-jawed landscape stalks,

diggers hunched double to the ground

are harvesting bright potatoes that constantly

endeavour, like mice, to escape, scuttle back

into the sodden soil, where roots compete

for water, and decay is life rekindling.  

Round-backed labourers, boulders fallen off

the mountain, sieve the soil for each stunted práta,

(size of a fingernail, ten minutes of a child’s life),

that scampered off the sleamhán, scuttled back

into the earth, fugitives from scrabbling fingers.

Potatoes, apples of the soil, sole currency of life

to those whose DNA shaped these fingers,

now rough with working the same earth.