The sadness of emigration is particularly marked at this time of year. An air of emptiness settles on old country farmhouses; they stand un-stirring in the becalmed, warm and dusty summer afternoons. I thought this aspect of life was in our past ten years ago. Driving through the countryside, I see too many houses that should be lively with grandchildren playing.
Inheriting The Land.
Here the sea is no more than a sigh
in a shell,
conversations speed past, pole high,
Dublin to Galway
and music is the wind whistling
beneath a door.
Slightness describes Summer's step,
stonework its skies; a little light
drips
from its edges but it's falling from
a miser's hand.
Across the fields the church, within
its necklace
of dead congregations, is a rusty
hinge;
a place filled with a century's
stillness.
And the ivy-choked trees lean closer
together
like old men guessing at each others'
words.
If you were to fly over these
patchwork hills,
along the hedgerows and through the
lightless haggards,
you'd never meet a soul. The old
farmers are sitting
in their twilight kitchens, their
families standing
on the mantelpiece in the other room
that's never used
with faces tanned beneath American
skies.
Only the din of crows seeps into that
silence;
crows more numerous than leaves on
the sycamores,
always bickering, hogging the light,
building their cities, staking their
inheritance.
Loughcrew, Co Meath
