Filiocht Nua: New Poetry

Valentine's Day, 2003

Long-billed birds waddle through marshland, at Aughcasla
we pause to feed ponies with dried grass. It is all silence now,
until above us, the hawk's wide wings are a sudden swooping gasp,
a sand-piper shrieks between claws and then, over the night fields falls
the deep, sad ring of funeral bells—strangers' headlights hurt the sky.

And we reach the cross dug deep into sand to remember another
killed in the civil war, at this beach's edge back in '21, frightened
sheep fleeing all around, the wild waves adding to the gunshot's
roar—his fellow volunteers scrambling over the Conor Pass, the gorse,
wind and snow piercing their fear, but still they go on, do not forget.

And memory is a fierce glow speeding through the Valentine sky;
someone just left, those gone way before—and us, slipping down the high
sand dunes, our recent words, inconsequential rain on our flaming cheeks,
our fingers held tight together, this full world ours to forgive and forget in,
while Callas soars through our ears from a radio we share at the sea's start.

Two Women in Kosovo

"I'm going to jump," her sister whispers,
holding out her hand.
And so they jump together—so naturally
they might be young girls again
leaping at waves on their holidays, jumping
across rivers on their way to school,
pulling each other over the road
to grown-up things.
From the side of the truck
out onto the rolling dust and scrub they jump,
tea and bread they've just eaten with the others,
a thump in their stomachs when they fall.
Holding hands tight, they jump—
two women in Kosovo leaving behind
their children, their mother, their husbands
gunned down by soldiers
in a roadside café minutes before
and now a mountain of grief
being driven to a mass grave
somewhere these sisters will never find.

One looks back for a second,
feels her whole life piled ugly there,
feels it was beautiful once—
the pull of her man reaching for her
in the middle of the night,
the bitter pain she knew when her four-year-old
left her for his first day at school,
her mother calling her back home
on a cold winter's night.
Luck chooses where we are born,
passes us through life
unscathed by violence.
Luck is this brave woman now
defying the brutal guards,
rising alive
from her pretend death
and the horror of corpses, the people she's loved—
a frightened survivor pulling
her frightened sister forward,
a sister whispering "jump!"

Talking to the Bees

for Maighréad Leonard

The city far away, in this place
Silence falls with the Angelus bells
and císte cróin baked the night before
is today rough-round, a solid cake crucifix-marked,
uncut, not to be topped with loganberry red
she preserved in the heat of mid-July
till this woman of the kitchen is ready
to raise her head from prayer
and we are all given the nod to eat.

But once in this place, the city far away
When the baking of bread was her mother's domain,
She ran free of the house, down the slope
where neighbors' farm-sheds seemed to bark
so full of tied-down dogs
that the old mountain ash ahead
became her bright rowan guard
to jump to if one of them unleashed.

And always the river rush
under the roadway loudly
or sometimes throbbing, approaching
like an imminent rare car
turning the road to school.
Then, what secrets could she have known—
her child's belly spread over the moss wall,
her tiny fingers threading the Dubhglas River's flow?
Did she stare so long that she felt
the whole world move before her
or see in the dark water stones
things that might come to her?

Her husband going out to tell the bees
—Tá sé faoi chré, our...