Still Lives
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Another winter’s child
He forced me down
in a mud-soiled patch
of early spring, my screams caught
behind the stone walls that
bar one field from another.
My body the River Moy, taken:
clogged with silt,
blocked then broken open.
My feet splayed out,
ankles twisting useless in the air
over a linen dress,
bloomers of my mother’s knitting.
Black boots in mud,
my hands as feeble claws.
Not a thing
I could do
to stop it.
~~~~
Weeks pass, shift
from rain to sudden darkness.
His coiled face sprung with rage,
home late from the pub,
mother as a hushed mouse
curled among blankets.
I bend over a coal stove baking
bread in the kitchen –
small brothers
cling to my apron.
Boiled milk curdles sick for me,
all I eat is a drop of porridge
and grow heavy
with wait.
~~~~
I hold three eggs in my hand,
steaming with the heat
of their mother.
Still lives that will never hatch,
food snatched from the mouths
of my mother and brothers
as my pockets fill with coins.
Money grows in me, like a birth.
I turn a stone ear to Danny when he cries
and fix porridge to fill their stomachs.
My eggs are my life, buried
deep in the folds of my dress
as I walk early to market,
the ravens and magpies
stripping the fields.
The young ones asleep
on their mats of straw,
like dry wisps of clover.
I wash their dungarees, overalls,
in the steaming tub,
under the crease
of my belly.
~~~~
Out in the fields
with autumn’s cusp
ringing in like church bells,
voices from the village
carry like dead leaves,
gather in corners.
I see my red hands
spread out across the stone wall,
tough and splayed.
They were a dove’s hands
when I played,
small and early
with the finches and corncrakes
circling and screeching
into morning.
Red hands,
rough with the hoe
and with washing,
grey flakes of soap
mixing with manure
from the goats
on pant cuffs.
The setting sun is a bleached sceptre
slicing down across fields
dead and razed
for November.
Samhain.
I stand on the edge of this field,
a corpse
with new life growing inside,
like the green shoot
that steals the heart
of the turnip,
asleep
in the cellar.
~~~~
I dream
of a woman
who is the ocean.
Her large rocking body
jostles me, roughly.
I belong to the fields,
the sky a grey teacher
and I the penitent,
watching the days drain
of winter light.
Still,
the ocean:
I taste her
in the salt mist
that fills my throat
at dawn,
her voice
harsh in the storm
that makes the cattle lie down
with listening.
I hear her
setting fire to the trees,
her rage pouring down
among hawthorn,
uprooting
the spines of oaks.
Mornings she retreats,
leaving her murmur
through stovepipes.
As I root through dust of coal
I whisper to her,
between shovels:
take me
~~~~
I break from dreaming,
thick with sweat.
A slip of moon
is waning in the sky.
It’s the clouds that stay still,
the moon that rides
like an icy pinnacle
through the dense thickets
of night growth, night moss,
hoary and black.
I rise from bed,
gather my satchel of clothing,
money from eggs.
Cross the kitchen
where their sleeping breath
mingles
with dying embers.
Close softly the door.
I walk heavily over the fields,
my weight pitching
over fine
grass hair cracking:
witches’ lace, the cairns
of frost broken
by the path
I am making
to the sea.
~~~~
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