Dripping from skeletal leaves and mouldering berries amid bramble tangle, the season’s essence consumes the land, the worn animal trail, the squelching mat of flattened grasses beside a surging culvert.  

Sheltered from the elements, ungrateful cattle, newly housed in sheds, still make muffled complaint, with baleful bellow and angry jostle of clanking gates.

Where sodden oozing earth a sponge is, here, expands the glassy turlough a failing, hazy, lifeless sun reflected, there feed flocks of swan, so vast the surface waters churn.  

With cry and wing beat, crow and heron attempt in vain to stir the saturating, bone seeping Autumn ether, where slow swirls of acrid blue turf smoke hang motionless, suspended in the cloying, vaporous, airless air.

Through the murk, men folk speed by upon shining, grease black roads, headlights dimmed, windscreen wipers racing, paying no heed to the weathered plaster virgin standing in the wall’s niche.

Moisture laden cobwebs trailing from her outstretched hands shudder in their wake. From inside the steaming cabs of mud caked tractors, old men in torn damp jackets, bedraggled dogs beside them, make for home.

When the stack in the haggard is reduced to a heap in the corner and Da props open the little byre window ready for the swallow’s return.

When the sucking mud in the low back field begins to cake and crack, and the cattle gaze wistfully at the new grass beyond the wire.

When the Vet’s white van hurtles less often in the early hours around the lanes of Ardeevin and Toberelva, his first crop of lambs already growing fat and brave.

When one of Eddie Coyne’s brood appear shyly at the kitchen door, with eager news, “I’m making the first confession soon!”

When curly leaved rhubarb emerges overnight and the fennel clump is dense enough to hide a white cat.

When the brightening length of day highlights paintwork in the hall, making Da search the loft for the “Brilliant White Gloss”.

When Henry from Frenchpark comes to clean the chimneys and the plain old stove in the back room stands black and cold.  

And when the creaky old dog is discovered, wriggling and rolling puplike on the grass beside the compost heap.  

That’s when Da, with anxious face, examines the lawnmower.

Six score and six more was the number of the herd. Six score and six more were all accounted for and a herd moved away from Dunamon.

There was blood on the ground by the causeway. There was blood on the ground, a new grave on the mound and a herd wound away from Dunamon.

Shocked young men bowed their heads on the causeway. Shocked young men bowed, bore a corpse through the crowd, when a javelin stole life at Dunamon.

Youthful promise snuffed out on the causeway. Youthful promise snuffed out, no intent there’s no doubt, now blood price must be paid by Dunamon.

Women watched with full hearts from the causeway. Beasts bellowing loud, in a slow dusty cloud, choked the drove trail away from Dunamon.

Six score and six more were all accounted for. The price of life lost at Dunamon, and a herd moved away from Dunamon.

She’s making ready, casting clear of the capstan. An umbilical uncoiling of rope. In the air and on lips a ferrous taste, dust ground from her screaming anchor chain. Gulls shriek, an infant wails and shawl muffled sobs escape a dark hold. 

A slap of sail in creaking rigging, groaning timbers, foam flecked brine. She’s rising and falling now on ocean’s swell, as hope rises, in the sturdy who line her decks….looking back.

Behind her on the horizon lies land, a history imprinted in tumbled walls, relinquished furrows, abandoned graveyards. Where reek mounds of gaunt cadavers, blighted, empty Ireland lies cursed. Ireland of the blackened stalk and putrid earth.

Across the waves she chases the setting sun, each day her cargo lighter. Stick-thin people, tragic ballast, stiff as the boards that support them, slip gently over her side, to the mumble of anguished prayer and rosary rattle.

For all her rocking she brings no sleep, only stench, retch and ruckle of lungs and loud tormented ravings of the fever flushed. With hoarse rasp and shudder the hollow eyed give up their last breath into the fetid air.

Strong men, reared on the spud, bed down among the dead and dying, a contagious desolation of mind the price of their sleep, a price gladly paid, for they no longer dare to dream.  

Yet whether dreams or nightmares stalk the shores of a foreign land, soon, if the weather stays fair, on the far side of a freshening wind, with her bow wave cresting, this ship of tears will find Canada….waiting.