The Great Hunger

 

 

 

She is the land and doesn’t want to see them go,
young men, afraid, of unknown shores.

But the potato crop has failed

and Ireland bleeds youth in ghost ships.

Phantom and matriarch of all,
she sits still as a statue

 

of our Virgin Mary  

outside a decrepit dusty church,

a bowl of blue sky tints her white dress

 

in hues of intense misery.
Mothers, frail as sheaves of wheat,

boil water on grit stoves,

 

warm their hands over the copper

kettle’s steam.  Far off, fathers,

skin ruddied as our barren mud,

dig graves in the crisp ground

and boy starvelings eat the worms

they unearth. From first light to nightfall,

our Priests lead Requiem Masses
as whole generations are mothered  

into our land’s gathering dust.

 

Reviews

[Donald Meikle]

And far did they roam, and cursed were they for coming. All due to a potato blight.
This is well written Sel (as usual) and a close part of my heritage

[Ken Simm.]

This has the plaintive cry of the pipes. The dread boom of the waves and thecoruscating cry of the lost and the lonely Hunger is not beautiful but this rmembrance is Ken.