Eirinn
Eirinn
Written by our daughter Laura
for Julia
How far
away you are.
How tight around my days
you wrap your moss green arms,
soil still under nails,
sea-salt tangled in auburn hair.
The hoofbeat horserace of your heart resounds
in every bodhran strike - pale skin
tight as the drum. Druids sway
in your walk, charmed hips
under linen, oak brown omen mark
on your left breast. Your children drink
prophecy and history and follow
their mother
into fallow fields to dig for impotent roots;
potatoes rotting black mud in you palms.
Blackness hardening into backbone, clutching
Celtic crosses, you stand erect, wool
wrapped against the sea, and nod
farwell to those children who grew
and mothered
my grandparents, my parents and me
in another land spinning
tales of emerald amidst the factory
cinder-block gray. And now when in my body
my babe jumps
to the fiddle's fly and bodran's beat
tiny hoofs like thunder pound
without knowing where they've been,
what race must be won.
The rhythm of survival bound in ancient blood
rises to the joy of the dance;
the catherine wheel burns blue through our skin.
Together - the end, the start of the line,
we shine and spin and dig for fortune
buried in the Celtic black soil of our bones.
