Let these old walls speak now
And tell all they can recall
Of old times when red deer hooves
Bruised soft moss on the stones
That familiar hands gathered later
Until there was enough and skill in hand
And land to build the old church on Dromard Hill.
There, was heard the people’s prayer
And stories too of bards and saints and schools
Monasteries and Druid-monks like Colmcille
Whose strong Gartan lads rowed again the Erne flow
And all the wet winds of night ‘til morning
To calm the white flutter of swans and gulls
On seven silver miles of Gowna
Where the mad calf leaped from the well
When Adam’s daughter washed her stockings in the water.
Soon the sounds of lapping on the black stones of Inch
Murmured with the psalms and strong songs of monks
Bells at vesper time turned cows’ heads
Homeward to the soft touch of hard hands
And the hum of white spray on scrubbed wooden buckets.
The setting sun on the crest of Aughnacliffe
Threw the dolmen’s shadow prostrate
On the spot where royal bones are dust
Still the stone stood its ground
Through nights without an end
And waited for the morning
Long before the holy women wondered
Who could move the stone.
And waited too in other dismal times
When fjord folk tore the eggs
From each monastic nest.
Waited while our neighbors crossed the Mearin drain
With Norman names and blades
Some like Henry with worn wives and wicked virtue
Couldn’t bear the vesper bell or knell
And the bards and books were banished too
Blocked by barbed wire and broken harps
Then Cromwell came with cruel crowds
And cut the heads off soaring hawks
And little chickens too beneath the tender wing.
But life clung in holes dark as wombs
Waiting for a window in the world.
The sun was not allowed to shine
On the dark awesome hours of the mind
But it found a way to steal between the clouds
And shone on the north side of hedges
In valleys where the young wore the moss
From the stones where they sat
And listened to the lark above the meadow.
And an underground scholar
With his head above the clay
Made worlds with his words
And put wings on little minds to sunshine fields
Far away from the tears and the dripping eaves of night
Hedge Masters like Mulligan and McDonnell
Larry Duffy and the priest Peter Connell
Who kept Colmcille alive and Iona
In the chapel on the hill ‘til it fell
So they bore the stones away
And built the Latin School of Moyne
The scholars came from a ten-mile outer rim
And heard the tales the teacher taught
When walls were whin and hawthorne wide
When the roof was sky for opening eager eyes
To the Iliad of Homer and the Tain of mighty Maeve
Virgil and Shakespeare, O Connaire and Peig
Abraham with Isaac and Jesus on the cross
Interwoven in the evenings with stories at the hearth
By long night talkers taking turns on the kitchen chairs of Crott
Like the Tailor Sheils from Smear
Or Phil Sheridan of the Lough.
Michael Doyle, 2008