Ode to Eire

Thick and viscous, membranes pulsating within the droplets of sweat that come from hard work in a damp climate, Ireland soars on its knees for you, muttering and scraping its legs and soles of feet as it moves along, beast of a brain incapacitated by drink and obligation. Wanting the other guy to know he’s no better, but stepping back into the shadows that others placed for it when its turn arises…the spotlight shining a rare but soft sun around the back of its neck, sore from crouching in safe houses, empty embellished halls of parliament, and on the lawns of Trinity, where it still is quite legal to shoot a catholic, if warranted. Ireland warrants every minute of every workday, no time for payday, already spent and around the bend it ambles; insides of lungs, stomach lining and bladder eviscerated by the amber clockwork that ticks beneath the witches’ brew – Barry’s, Guinness, Hard Grain in every corner, never to be swept up, just swept under the rug. Into the gene pools of the world. Hands cover mouths which talk double time to your front and your behind, the ever shifting necessity arriving and departing of perfect social hours intermingled with quiet, shameful alones. Shake any family tree and an Irish woman falls out---between her knees, falls from the tree the hoards of red blooded over workers, overbearing mothers and easy lays (on St. Patrick’s Day). Girls with something to prove, everything to lose and a collective heart beating which tries ever to not look at its own face, impossible to stop believing what reflection is shown to it by the empires that laid claim. Embedded with myth that knows not a reality or a truth; one that is forever trapped by the original name with which it was once slain and re-connected. Trembling and hopping mad, spinning in Celtic circles of death and reclaim, until it finds itself yet again, sneaking around the house at night, out to visit with the Thing it most enjoys, covertly wrought over, to the extreme, alone, so no one else can sit and judge, or try to understand. Secrets seem to hold more weight, fleshing out the poem into a lifetime of land reforms, of contradiction unsatisfied and identity undone, all in the timbre that fills out its life in between lives, in the notes that are heard, before and after, but never during the outpouring of song. Drowning in these sound waves, Ireland comes up for air, flails its arms about and screams like a banshee on a late night visit to the off licence.

~ M. Lucia