BY KEVIN CAHILL
AN GORTA MOR
Three stoic women in aprons stand alongside a long table
fifty souls on two benches
barely tethered to their own bones,
The women ladle steaming broth the color of ditch water
into tureens secured by chains
almost too short for lifting to one’s lips.
Here Famine and Charity are siblings
fathered by Theft,
born of a pagan slave girl Brigid,
baptized and canonized by the Holy See,
their incestuous offspring
tutored by rooks and herons,
planted in sod huts and feverish workhouses,
interred in oval pits, black lumps
a stone’s throw from their final failing breath
eat… starve… toil… it is all one…
but mind you leave the bowl and spoon,
none of this belongs to you lot,
mucky from the stumble-road to the soup-house,
fifty pairs of hands hunt bits of turnip
in a cup that conjures black tubers floating on the upturned soil,
dumbstruck dreams dropped upon a clodden plot of earth,
trembling spindly fingers scrape bowls’ bottoms
while rumours sail over the cresting queue
of filthy threadbare caps with news –
the coffin-ships departed with the desperate dreaming-dead
yet to be delivered across the deep-way to Canada –
they are dead,
the dead you once toiled beside,
whose shadows followed them to Dublin
to Liverpool and shrank on cramped wooden decks,
to sail like St. Brendan on the backs of plunging whales,
to rediscover and reenter Eden
to end their cruel exile from life and God…
they are dead, …the dead who would not die here.
– an gorta mor –
a dank wind muffles muttered kennings,
cryptic word-stones marking the remains of a mother tongue’s
tales of boys and slingshots bringing down rooks,
of girls chanting rhymes about the Black Death,
of downcast mothers holding their babes,
here everything is steadily being unremembered.
The dour women return to rinse away
the leavings clinging miraculously to bowls and spoons,
every six minutes like clockwork
fifty more must displace this lot at the long table,
followed by another and then another
till the cauldrons all are empty, the soup-house closed
the stoic women sequestered and secret,
leaving the inconvenient, unfed mute to loiter on the margins,
shadows in waiting shadows in the making.
It is you who are here and become a shadow
invisible here even to the jackdaws
who scour the skies and the fields,
invisible here to the peacock landlords
who tend to their tarnished tail feathers
and feed their corpulent vanity
behind thick walls and locked gates,
here you will find neither a future nor a grave,
alongside canals where wizened herons stand among the reeds,
where barges carry grain and corn
to be distilled into unholy spirits.
Your hovel house will be pulled down and burned,
become a scab and then a scar
and then a green pasture where cattle graze picturesquely,
their own slaughter to be savored on porcelain plates
and blessed in alien cadences over silver laden tables.
The dead who will die here will be eaten alive
by their own famished livers, kidneys and hearts,
hands and feet unstrung and artless,
the home ground grown tedious and sloppy,
a maelstrom of rain lashes,
morning-shrouds and smoldering turf,
you will lie wraithlike in a sodden ditch
as if poised to float away on the mud-waves.
no ears attending your ghost-name,
you have already disappeared,
you who will die here.
