2ndwitch: Dublin, with Joan.

My great grandmother was a Murphy . .

I viewed the men and women who stood on the waterside.

I gazed at their ravaged faces and the skeletal frames

That were frozen there in time,

Fossilized by the art of the sculptor, and wondered.

Did I, descendant of an emigrant pst, returned as though in homage,

Have the right to gaze on this, this most personal

Of memorials? Was I an intruder on a moment

Of personal and intimate grief?

The Bog People.

In silent hush, but amongst the milling people who were there to gaze,

To look long and long and to marvel,

I stared in awe at the people from so long ago.

Skin leathered by time and peat,

Face preserved in death’s anguish and the

Scream of death preserved deep and dark,

So many years had passed, and yet they lay

As if they fell to sleeping only yesterday.

Death is amongst us all, and will not pass away.

1916.

As though the clock had melted and melded time

Into a swirl of Guinness in a glass,

I stood and stared at the towering walls, the place

That had stood the test of melting time,

Punctuated only by the bullet marks of despair.

Bullet marks; echoed by the round remains of the coins

That were minted before, today, tomorrow,

Currency of time that melts and swirls

Like Guinness in a glass.

2ndwitch