Perspectives on Ireland

Tha shein ukrosh

10NOV1997

They tell us now with gleeful irony it came from farthest West.
Our modern-day Tir na nOg where youth and age remain separated.
Then you could have called it what it was, an ill-fated magick wind.
Like the storms that wrecked an armada or the ships of the French fleet.
Some nefarious British wizard calling on the darkest curse,
To lay open Her Four Green Fields and exile Her from Her sacred round.
The silence and the still should have alerted Her to the impending doom.
He invoked Providence to disclaim his responsibility,
Yet no where in this horror can you detect the hand of God/dess.
Indeed it seems more like the final phase of a nightmare of hate.
In this last blow he stole Her vivacity, Her community.
She began to eat at Herself once the blight had taken the crops.
When neighbor speared neighbor's potato through the barn roof, he had won.
Like Macha, full with child, raced to Her death by an insolent king,
A barefoot naked lass in her father's swallowtail coat raced too.
Keeping pace with an Englishman's carriage with pride to prove her worth.
She ran two miles with the indefatigable strength that is eHrinn.
She takes his money like fruit from the trees that should be hers to pick.
Her neighbors dead of the 'great hunger' as the British eat Her fruit.
The chickens slaughtered, the cows and horses bled, any hope She had, gone.
Her children forced to dig with their toes through the offal for fish scraps.
She will die in caves eating raw shellfish and on the roadsides as well.
On the way to the workhouses Her graves are the ditches where She fell.
Absentee British rent tithing to an alien church left Her poor.
If She wanted to leave, a sacrilege indeed, there was no way.
At every turn his 'political economy' had to be fed,
Like a vulture waiting to pick Her white bones clean of any life.
Her huts, where generations had scratched out an impoverished living,
Were torn down after 'Gale Day' to make way for his cattle and sheep.
Her breathing skeletons were a surplus like Her stolen produce.
The scurvy and lice-borne typhus would not kill enough for his taste.
"We must not complain of what we really want to obtain," says he.
With a Machiavellian device he would force the others who still lived out.
More than an acre and She gets none of Soyer's fine soup.
Like the days when Her horses couldn't be worth more that five pounds.
If She would only sell her land rights She could have the change to get out.
She wishes Swift's satire had the magickal power of the Bards.
Roast baby and two million hanging trees this would end Her food problem.
The final dance of father and son at his American Wake,
These are the last memories She has of seven centuries of oppression.