A stony stretch. Grey boulders
Half-buried in furze and heather,
Purple and gold – Connemara’s
Old bones dressed in colours
Out of a royal past.
Inshore the sea is marbled
And veined with foam. The Twelve Pins
Like thunderclouds hewn from rock
Or gods in a cloudy fable
Loom through an overcast.
The roofless dwellings have grown
Back to the earth they were raised from,
And tune with those primordial
Outcrops of grey stone
Among the furze and the heather.
Where man is dispossessed
Silence fills up his place
Fast as a racing tide.
Little survives of our West
But stone and the moody weather.
Taciturn rocks, the whisht of the Atlantic
The sea-thrift mute above a corpse-white strand
Pray silence for those vanished generations
Who toiled on a hard sea, a harsher land.
Not all the bards harping on ancient wrong
Were half as eloquent as the silence here
Which amplifies the ghostly lamentations
And draws a hundred-year-old footfall near.
Preyed on by gombeen men, expropriated
By absentee landlords, driven overseas
Or to mass-burial pits in the great famines,
They left a waste which tourists may call peace.
The living plod to Mass, or gather seaweed
For pigmy fields hacked out from heath and furze –
No eye to spare for the charmed tourist’s view,
No ear to heed the plaint of ancestors.
Winds have rubbed salt into the ruinous homes
Where turf-fires glowed once: waves and seagulls keen
Those mortal wounds. The landscape’s an heroic
Skeleton time’s beaked agents have picked clean.