ONE OF THE THREE GREAT PREHISTORIC
BURIAL MOUNDS ON THE RIVER BOYNE
Who is it beside me, who is here beside me, in the hollow hill?"
A foreigner I am. "You've dug for nothing. The Danes were here
A thousand years before you and robbed me of my golden bracelets,
Stinking red-haired men from the sea, with torches and swords."
Dead king, you keep a better treasure than bracelets,
The peace of the dead is dearer than gold, no one can rob you.
What do you watch, old king, from the cave? "In the north the
muddy chippers of flint on the Antrim coast,
Their chests covered with hair and filth, shrewd eyes under
bushes of brow, clicking the flints together.
How we used to hate those hunters. One squats in a cave-mouth
and makes an axe, one in a dune shapes bolt-heads."
They have all (and we too, old king) been dead for thousands of
years. I see in the north a red-haired woman
Meeting her lover by Shane O'Neill's cairn, her peasant husband
is drunk at home, she drifts up the hill
In the sleeve of twilight. "Mary Byrnes is that you?" "Ye may
kiss a hure but not name her. Ah, lad, come down.
When I was a wee maid I used to be loving Jesus,
All helpless and bleeding on the big cross. I'd never have married
my drunkard only the cart ran over him.
He lay helpless and bleeding in the black lane. Och, laddie, not
here now.
Carry me up to the cairn: a man lies bloodily under the sharp
black stones, I love that man."
Mary Byrnes, when her lover has done and finished, before he
stands up
To button his clothes together, runs a knife in his throat. "Oh
Shane O'Neill it's you I was loving,
Never one else. You helpless and bleeding under the stones.
Do ye weary of stretching quiet the four long centuries? Take
this lad's blood to hearten you, it drops through the stones.
Drips, drops in the stones.
Drink, Shane; drink, dear: who cares if a hure is hanged? We kill
each other in Ireland to pleasure the dead."
Great upright stones higher than the height of a man are our walls,
Huge overlapping stones are the summer clouds in our sky.
The hill of boulders is heaped over all. Each hundred years
One of the enormous stones will move an inch in the dark.
Each double century one of the oaks on the crown of the mound
Above us breaks in a wind, an oak or an ash grows.
"I see in the south Cloyne round tower burning: the Christians
have built a spire, the thieves from the sea have burnt it,
The happy flame streams roaring up the stone tube and breaks
from the four windows below the stone roof
Like four bright banners.
The holy men scream in their praying, the golden reliquaries are
melted, the bell falls clanging."
They have all (and we too, old king) been dead for a thousand
years. I see on the island mountain Achill,
In the west where wave after wave of the beaten tribes ran up
and starved, an old woman, her head
Covered with a shawl, sits on Slieve Mor. Two thin sharp tears
like knives in the yellow grooves of her face,
"My cow has died," she says, "and my son forgets me." She
crouches and starves, in the quivering Atlantic wind,
Among the great skulls of quartz on the Achill mountain.
What do you watch, old king, from the cave? "A cause of mighty
laughter in the mound on the hill at Dundalk.
They piled the earth on the blood of one of their spitfire princes,
their bold watchdog of the Ulster border.
After two handfuls of centuries
One Bruce, a younger drinker of battles, bloodily ceasing to be
king of Ireland was buried above him.
Now a rich merchant has built his house on the mound's head,
a living man. The old capon perches there trembling,
The young men of Ireland are passionate again, it is bad for
a man of peace to have built on the hill of battles,
Oh his dear skin, Oh the papers of his wealth.
Cuchulain looks up at Bruce and Bruce at the sweating merchant.
By God if we dead that watch the living
Could open our mouths, the earth would be split with laughter."*
I hear like a hum in the ground the Boyne running through the aging
Fields forever, and one of our great blue spiral-cut stones
Settle in the dark a hair's breadth under the burden of the hill.
"We hear from cairn to cromlech all over Ireland the dead
Whisper and conspire, and whinnies of laughter tinkle in the raths.
The living dream but the dead are awake."
High in Donegal, in the bitter waste north, where miles on miles
of black heather dwindle to the Bloody Foreland,
Walks an old priest, near crazy with solitude and his peasants
like cattle, he has wrestled with his mental Satan
Half his lifetime, and endured and triumphed. He feels the reward
suddenly await him, the churchyard wall
Looks light and faint, the slabs and mounds by the entrance. In
the midst of mass the crucified image trembles
Above the altar, and favorably smiles. Then Father O'Donnel
Gabbles the Latin faster to an end and turns himself once more
and says to the people, "Go home now.
Missa est." In the empty church he screams and spits on the Christ,
He strikes it with his hand. Well done, old priest.
"Is the man on
the cross his God, why does he strike his God?"
Because the tortured torturer is too long dying; because the strain
in the wounded minds of men
Leaves them no peace; but here where life is worn out men should
have peace. He desires nothing but unconsciousness,
To slip in the black bottomless lake and be still. Time for us also,
Old king, although no strain so many thousands of years has
wounded our minds, time to have done
With vision, as in the world's youth with desire and deed. To lie
in the dark in the hill until the stones crumble,
And the earth and the stars suck into nothing, the wheel slopes
and returns, the beautiful burden is renewed.
For probably all the same things will be born and be beautiful
again, but blessed is the night that has no glowworm.
