Wood-famine bends my shiring maps.
Only the moon’s full sleepwalking face
swelling out the walls seems fully alive,
faded indigo its standard of intangibility.
Yellow leaves lie fossilled in the roadway
where all market cries have been forbidden:
the crested lark and the Calandra lark
build lucrative niches on the bark of trees.
Each time we forded the baser river
a freshness rose from the fineness of the water,
the veins of sand. Unangeled now and colourless,
the still very bloated lough
stretching the old rounded image of the island.
The blue gorse sliced its view
into tree-abounding land parcels
whose branches pressed like moths
that filled each wasted county like a sack.