Poetry > Sequences
(i) 1847
It's the hunger, your honour
nothin' but the hunger.
I worked till I could stand no more.
I'm faint with it now, sir.
An' there's my wife at home
an' the six little ones.
All we had
was a handful of yellow meal
the day before yesterday
an' nothin' these two days.
I'd go home to lie down, but
I can't be lookin' in their eyes.
The little ones lie down all day.
When I enter they are still.
My wife looks in the dead hearth.
She doesn't pray now.
Beggin' your pardon, your honour
the hunger will be the death of us.
(ii)
Touching finger to forelock—
these things we don't forget.
The proud tongue shackled
in its place a language to beg in.
A blemish on the green shoot
putrefies the land.
They learn the scrunch and scrape
of bailiffs' boots
the hiss of water on raked coals
the meaning of dispossessed.
(iii) Famine Path, 1997
Like a penitential way
we worry it with beads.
A stooped wind burdening us
as if we bear a disabling load:
memory
nursed like a need
the hunger
that brings us here
as if on this bleak Calvary
we might come on an affirmation
of who we are,
like words from the cross.
Our ancestors ate grass
diseased lips dribbled green bile.
We'll make a song of it yet.
Section (i) is suggested by an account in Alexander Somerville's
Letters from Ireland during the Famine of 1847, Ed. K.D.M. Snell,
Irish Academic Press, (1994). Letters first published in the
Manchester Examiner.