My ancestral ties in this outport
sunk Irish spades into gritty earth
and with that first scratch metal slit sliding into futile soil
they looked to the tossing grey above them
and the great black mirror that stretched
all the way back to famished Dublin
and just sat in the dark with their hungry wives
and farmed the treacherous seas.
What would I have been three centuries ago?
I’d have worked net in hard fingers —
gave sallow kisses ankle deep in frigid Atlantic
and went out
into the wide gape of the sea skimming
precisely parallel infinities,
black shadow teeming abyss beneath,
white gull flocked boundlessness above.
A cold death in both.
Whales blasting and bodies bursting free
about the bows of tiny cod vessels
ice mountains sailing manned by starving crews
snow-coated bears
endless forest dense as bookshelves
and haunted with all the myths of the old country.
Old Nick prancing in the blackest nights on distant crags
or peeping up out of the night from the shored boats,
pushing men overboard and sending sudden storms.
Those were hungry days on farmless lands
where my ancestors’ hands hauled thrashing rope traps
from the murderous depths and knew that this place
from the ocean to the howling barrens
to the silt soil and stone lands to the ambushing maelstroms
rolling with ungodly speed from the northern Viking tombs
like revenge
to the devil peeping into their hobbled huts
to the forest filled with beasts and brutes and banshees
is a stand against death.
My wiry body is my great grandmother’s.
A body that withstands the cold and the endless toil
and the black pessimism of the overplucked seas.
Fingers of salt hardened bone.
Eyes quick but without that psychic stare
she learned from reading clouds and Atlantic scents.
It is a body that could starve or eat for years without changing
cagey ribbed torso always at the ready
built to withstand, labouring baskets about the uneven
rocky ground,
surefooted for this place, hard as cold hammer rings.
She was all tight-lipped unconvincing smiles
cynical crow’s feet by her tiny ugly eyes
and hands and knees and elbows knuckly.
The skin on my forearms is translucent in the sun,
generations of February light has seen to this,
eyes lined already for the grief of dubious relentless love
veins like white-filtered trails of seaweed up ghostly limbs.
This island has built us of bone.