Padraig’s journey
I imagine you smelt
the stench of decomposing tubers when
the blight broke through the Mayo air.
Maybe you saw
failing farms, fleeing families,
the Clew Bay countryside lined with corpses;
too few left to bury the dead.
Perhaps you saw
ships sailing out laden with grain while priests
performed requiems
for dead children;
mothers weeping together
where the big houses stood empty.
You perhaps heard of
evicted families crowding into workhouses.
A false refuge with —
disease and death as fellow residents.
You would have heard
of a better life across the Atlantic,
for those who could afford passage.
You may have heard that
those ships were called
coffin ships with good reason.
I know that you sought work and a future
in an England industrialising;
an England needing
navigators for new railways and canals;
an England seeing cheap, available labour
on its doorstep.
You did what you had to do.
But
a dark, damp cellar in
an overcrowded court on Scotland Road
became your lot with a wife and three.
A back to back alley,
a single underground room,
to sleep
to eat
to exist.
A small window to view boots, hooves, wheels.
Daylight seeping through street rubbish.
Bare earth or a stone floor, cold, damp walls.
One bed, straw mattresses, a table, four chairs.
No water, no toilet.
Outside—
one tap, open drains, communal toilets, seeping sewers.
A place but no home
except for
typhoid, TB, cholera.
And now I watch Clew Bay from this hilltop.
Three hundred sixty-five islands below.
Ovals and lozenges formed as outcrops
for winter wildfowl and waders in Mayo.
The red-breasted mergansers and dunlins
fish the shallows; curlews circle above —
gulls, geese, wigeon and swans stand on the drumlins
waiting to forage these waters I love.
Croagh Patrick crowns this bay, a breeding ground
for puffins, peregrines and ravens, wheeling
on warm air rising from the mighty mound.
This is a land innocent, but still bleeding.
Above — so blue, the big Atlantic sky.
Padraig, did you cry as you said goodbye?
the stench of decomposing tubers when
the blight broke through the Mayo air.
Maybe you saw
failing farms, fleeing families,
the Clew Bay countryside lined with corpses;
too few left to bury the dead.
Perhaps you saw
ships sailing out laden with grain while priests
performed requiems
for dead children;
mothers weeping together
where the big houses stood empty.
You perhaps heard of
evicted families crowding into workhouses.
A false refuge with —
disease and death as fellow residents.
You would have heard
of a better life across the Atlantic,
for those who could afford passage.
You may have heard that
those ships were called
coffin ships with good reason.
I know that you sought work and a future
in an England industrialising;
an England needing
navigators for new railways and canals;
an England seeing cheap, available labour
on its doorstep.
You did what you had to do.
But
a dark, damp cellar in
an overcrowded court on Scotland Road
became your lot with a wife and three.
A back to back alley,
a single underground room,
to sleep
to eat
to exist.
A small window to view boots, hooves, wheels.
Daylight seeping through street rubbish.
Bare earth or a stone floor, cold, damp walls.
One bed, straw mattresses, a table, four chairs.
No water, no toilet.
Outside—
one tap, open drains, communal toilets, seeping sewers.
A place but no home
except for
typhoid, TB, cholera.
And now I watch Clew Bay from this hilltop.
Three hundred sixty-five islands below.
Ovals and lozenges formed as outcrops
for winter wildfowl and waders in Mayo.
The red-breasted mergansers and dunlins
fish the shallows; curlews circle above —
gulls, geese, wigeon and swans stand on the drumlins
waiting to forage these waters I love.
Croagh Patrick crowns this bay, a breeding ground
for puffins, peregrines and ravens, wheeling
on warm air rising from the mighty mound.
This is a land innocent, but still bleeding.
Above — so blue, the big Atlantic sky.
Padraig, did you cry as you said goodbye?
