The Ghent Review Volume1, Number 1, summer 2016 | Page 13

never gave up residence
but hallow the woods
the congregating trees
rising behind the house

ii
this land the planters said
is mountainous and boggy
not suitable for tillage
good only for lazybed lumpers
the year's summer hunger
and of course his grace's tithes
running along our backwall
a track leads upwards
to where gaunt grassland wears
purpling heathers and fern
blackthorn and gorse and bracken
like a patched and thread-bare tweed
one sunday we walked that way
to the heart of our townland
guided by a pre-famine map
which at its centre showed
five dwellings neatly clustered
a clachan of black rectangles
a route over rough fieldstones
before it meets the boreen
that overlays the old track
it contours the stubborn hill
rising under shehy mor
guardian of this landscape
in the view northwards
the shapely paps of anu
protean goddess of plenty
appeased once by need-fires
and the priestcraft of mass
and may-day patterns
we looked and looked again
we paced the ground
where the map said they'd be
but there were no dwellings