Roots

First Published  in Carty's Poetry Journal Christmas 2011

                            

I come bearing sheets of forked ideas

and web-linked names of strangers

from whose loins I'd sprung.

I come as a city dweller,

to find in what small and mean house, or field,

my predecessors had struggled, unaware as yet

that more could be known

than the next harvest, the next child.

At first I found three modern houses,

complete with double garages, new cars,

and trampolines; each fresh house

with an apron of closely manicured useless grass,

whose clippings, heaped to rot, led me up the lane way

to where the ditch was still agrowing,

and the years were taken back

to when the moss covered stones, 

were still naked in their busyness,

and when a bend was first turned,

. . . . for God knows what reason.

It is to this bend I go now

this willful or unconscious hieroglyph, 

where one man stopped

and made our family’s home.

                            

I find the first, weathered and decaying house,

single storied, single roomed, one eyed and open mouthed, silent in its memories of house proud ornament, 

busy courtesan hens, and other 'yard to pots.' 

At the second house, a horse waited, half-door open,

I was recognised.

as one of those who braided straw to bend its will, 

and so, it tipped its head and snorted.

We gazed; exchanging memories, and

I saw in his stead, Maureen, and Delia, 

mother and farmer’s daughter, 

names I know from a census night, 

that were impressed by pen, clumsy in  thickened hand,  listing proudly read and write; 

English for the future,

English and Irish, for the past.

Three cottages in all, with no door facing another

so each man, father and son,

could leave in the morning and go his own way.

From here, at the age of fifteen, my great-grandfather,

had left and crossed the fields to another farm,  

picked by the same calculation and observation, 

he learned at the side of a towering leg,

that was never uncovered,  never revealed, as flesh.

Even in death, those trunks had remained so,

covered by a shroud
that strangely stretched from chin to toe,
and those great hands that had spread seed,
were now knuckled, and bound

restrained by prayer, and rosary bead.

                                   

In the graveyard of Kilcolman, where he lies now,

within a worms length of farmers
who once eyed his land with intent,
between the lichen and moss,

I searched  in vain for a carved name,

that would tell me, I too lay here in part.

And the western wind,
that is without beginning  or end, 
fills all the empty spaces between them

and me, and around these stone placements

I stagger, not knowing where, and when,

I am to fall.

Suddenly, from the derelict church, of rounded stone and sky,

a shivering  dog fox bolts from where the hunters lie,

and I was shocked to see, as if it was always there,

a landscape shared with toil and care,

and rough hewn cart, followed by skipping waif,

and a tired stooped man, 
with chin on forearm,  on upright spade, 
gazed wistfully in my direction,

and saw his future, before him laid.

©Niall OConnor from Change in the Wind 2013

The current resident of my Great-great-grandfather's house.

Extended by a later generation.

The graveyard at Kilcolman

The railway line that once led to Cobh, and the New World.

The Grandfather's journey ended up in Brooklyn, where the Irish and Italians so loved each other.

And then back to Roscommon, the new Free State, and the first Senate.

His final resting place. Back to the soil of the west of Ireland.