Glencolumbkille, Ireland
I.
Two hundred years ago
to keep their berry-nosed babies warm,
my Irish ancestors put cribs by fireplaces,
and there in a hut with barely a chimney,
they’d all coughed until their thirties
until they were laid to rest in a wound in the earth.
Before this land would take them
in its motherly arms and fold them into history,
perhaps it’d softly press its lips to their lips,
their jawbone, ribs, scarred lungs. Perhaps
it’d wrap them in the same blanket,
(black pebbled and dappled as the heavens)
that it wrapped their mother, their sister,
their grandfather in.
II.
My husband leads me and my daughters up
the hillside. The Glencolumbkille rain
is too soft for umbrellas. My husband’s as tall
as the marriage stone. Through the carved hole
I see his honey-black eyes, and we press our fingertips
through. We hold our daughters up
to do the same. Perhaps some blood of mine built
fairy doors (like these) on a hillside
for their daughters and sons to kneel by,
to adorn with leaves and trinkets.
They descend and I stand blinking
towards the sea a little longer.
III.
I see my father with his green hat
at the base of the village, too old to climb
hillsides. We both stand with our backs
to the cliffside–these cliffs have been peeled
back to their black bones by centuries
of Irish storms. We stare off into the sea,
as I am sure, our ancestors stared off
into the sea, through the thick air,
weaved with water and hurt.
We stay there and swear we see
something out there in the distance,
so lovely and dark we can’t look away.
I can’t say what it is, but there is an ancient
hunger here, like a family lying
by an unmapped road, like a poet wrestling
his pages apart and into oblivion, like a sailor
fighting at sea who swears
he can see his small fishing
village in the distance.
• • •
Meg McManama is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of North Texas and has an MFA from Brigham Young University. Her pieces are published or forthcoming in Poets.org, Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, The Pinch, Poetry Wales, Citron Review, Cimarron Review, Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere. She teaches writing in Texas.