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.
