The Ghent Review Volume1, Number 1, summer 2016 | Page 14

only the cottiers' small fields ringed by battered walls of stone iii when the hunger came that time wrensong and the sough of trees filled the air as they do now bog cotton shone below killhanna lough allua still gleams in moonlight and a vixen's bark sounds as inconsolable some blame anu unappeased who withheld her grace at last or the failure of the latin litany to move the providential will but it was remorseless morality weighted with colonial law starved families from their hovels pungent turf smoke like the mists still clings to these same hillsides and in desultory westering light the brocken spectre even now has the power to spook but it could be no more baleful than the eviction agent's shadow mean