Your thorned back
heavily under the creel
you steadily stamped the rising daffodil.
Your set mouth
forgives no one, not even God’s justice
perpetually drowning law with grace.
Your cold eyes
watched your drunken husband come
unsteadily from Sodom home.
Your grained hands
dandled full and sinful cradles.
You built for your children stone walls.
Your yellow hair
burned slowly in a scarf of grey
wildly falling like the mountain spray.
Finally you’re alone
among the unforgiving brass,
the slow silences, the sinful glass.
Who never learned,
not even ageing, to forgive
our poor journey and our common grave
while the free daffodils
wave in the valleys and on the hills
the deer took down with their instinctive skills,
and the huge sea
in which your brothers drowned sings slow
over the headland and the peevish crow.