Showing posts with label "Inis Oirr". Show all posts
Showing posts with label "Inis Oirr". Show all posts

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.


Monday, April 13, 2009

At Naomh Einne's Well

One of the strangest looking holy wells in Ireland is very close to Father Ted’s house in the Burren. The frames of old electrical appliances are nailed onto trees serving \as frames for religious pictures. At least that’s the way it was a number of year’s ago when I visited.
Naomh Einne’s well is on Inis Oirr. It was probably a youngster supplementing his pocket money. The matchstick ladder was a quirky little addition. I wonder if the clear circles left behind fazed him. This poem was included in “Turn Your Head” (Dedalus Press)

At Naomh Einne’s Well

Kneeling down, the jacket off,
shirt sleeves rolled to the oxter,
he slipped his arm into the water,
scooped out the price of a pint,
then thought the better of it
and decided he’d have two.

Then again the following Tuesday
and the following Tuesday too
till there were only clear circles
and coppers on the green bottom,
a bowl in a gap in the wall,
a cross in another with a ladder
of matchsticks and thread.