Coins
Capt. Ger Grant of Moyne, Co. Tipperary, a highwayman, was the last person to be hanged in the Old Gaol, Maryborough (now Portlaoise), in August 1816.
He would bathe in streams,
tiny fish at home around his limbs,
eat nuts and berries by the road,
shave with a lake for his mirror.
Woods and forests -- his friends --
concealed him in comforting arms.
Or so freedom seemed
in his memory.
But this country had been taken from him,
as once he had taken its precious coins,
draped in shadow on boreens where
lone horsemen sauntered between towns.
And in place of the streams they had given
him
darkness, and the tantalising smells
of Maryborough women
baking bread in turf stoves.
Finally they gave him a noose to wear
and, closing his eyes, he was back in a landscape
of wood and stream as autumn issued
its first, water-marked leaves.
Lower Main Street
(i.m. Eddie Boylan)
I remember your room and the table,
and your brother hovering about in the background,
the knots of knuckles in your fingers,
the way you eyed my cassette machine with suspicion.
But I do not remember exactly how I came
to be
close to you in your final years, to coax you
back to when you were my age, a boy
in a turn-of-the-century midland town
where newspapers were the post-communion
liturgy
at the back of church. And in the richness
of tea and grain, scents I did not recognise
then, nor have I since, we faced each other,
young men across a century of change, our
town
outside your grocery shop, transformed at such a pace
that, stepping out from your fading world, rich
in an obsolete currency, the notes
for that article in my hand -- only
the butchers greeting made me real in time
as the clocks of his hanged carcases dripped
seconds on the slab behind the glass.
Alternative Histories
What would we do if all the historians
were found dead, their voices silent,
their theories, illegible,
stuffed in their pockets?
When I was twelve the only man
who knew who built the fence around that field
was discovered face down in the barley,
his last words lost on crows.
And if we know this morning
who lives in this or that house, who owns
the corner shop with the paper stand,
we are unaware of the wind outside,
the chimney-pots shifting ominously
on their perches, the fast cars coming
blindly into the bends ahead, driven
by historians who have yet to learn our names.