The Lament of the Irish Women

The babies are dead

on the sea. Far from home, watery shapeless arms

embracing the little bodies, the little cries fed brine,

the timbers cracking like skulls.

Silver fish, in days to come gripped in heavy net,

split open on china plate rimmed with gold, Wedgewood and Waterford,

generations back through centuries and hurricanes and wide

sargasso calms,

bore the small squalling things down and down

to the floor from which rises Azores and Iceland and

Canary and the rolling green land of the mothers

who are told

You will bear the children of rape or you will be hanged.

Years away they will tear the lightning from the sky and put it in machines,

but also they will build drafty houses with cellars they will fill with

bones and the smell of turf on the wind will set the fist around the heart.

Better to fall forever into the gray palace of the seabed

than to eat grass and dirt in the dolmens of a throatcut land.

This is what the mothers say, but they speak with the tongue and not the heart.

Turning over and over, head over heel, slowly turning and tumbling,

somersaulting

held by no cord

a greater hold

Ah but they say it is the most peaceful way to die, he tells them on the beach

when the news comes in

weeks later. But what does he know, who will break his neck falling from a ladder?

Is not the world a ladder, she thinks, all of us God's creatures climbing and going down

at whim it seems. And what is at the top but the land of

dead children, we wail to see them again and this is the sound we all have within us

that we are desperate to unhear with song and silence and drink and

lightning in machines

automatons to take the helm of the world and run it onto the breakers

and shake us all down a few rungs of the ladder.

[You used to hold my hand when the plane took off]

A tiny small coughing then

a tiny small

belly

head

bottom

settles on soft sand

this is the final peace of the in-between

if there is such a thing as peace

in this desert of sea

this is the calm

coming to rest within this garden of souls

waving like sea grass though there is nothing here

just the weight of the entire ocean holding

like a womb.

Someday the sea will boil away just as the land

and the coils of chain and broken ships and the thick black python of cable

that powered the machines

will crack in the sun

and the bleached bones of coelacanths and whales

will be the cathedrals to be dismantled,

to be rebuilt into a new ladder

so we can carry the babies up

- the sea will give up her-

after so much time in dark

let them, as warriors, bathe in the calm

milk

of the stars

for once.