By James O’Brien
Take my hand then Hiba,
To the Fields of Athenry,
We’ll go then to the blackthorn,
The hawthorn copse,
Lay awhile, try and breathe,
Try to survey heaven or hell.
The blitzscape tumbrils,
Draw you back to this place,
A paradisiacal curse,
Stashed in the bleached archive,
Of perpetual misery,
Generational hostage to ill-fortune.
There’s a scalpeen made of asbestos,
Bundle of horror dust and lesion,
The traipse through rubble,
The townships of polluted water,
Desecrated groves, bloodied the waves,
As children reappear as apparitions.
Hiba, you will dig with your bare hands,
The ill-concealed body parts revealed,
Now almost dust but still clouts of hair,
Reveal once there was a child.
Gather up the parsimonious remains,
We shall have a funeral of wraith.
The procession winds pendulum way,
The dispossessed unsure to be alive,
The devastation, like the human remains,
Clinging to the sands of degraded time.
We meet at the graveyard there are skulls,
Where not our delusional knot binds.
