The famine’s darkest year, Black ’47,
The last of the seed tubers eaten,
The potato crop, a black, putrid stench,
Bare blackberry brambles
Watercress pulled from the brook
Eating the sea kelp awash on the beach
Soon, nothing was left
To glean from the land
In fevered need, beyond reason,
For sustenance
Clumps of sod thrust in your mouth
Lips rimmed green
A verdigris, foamy sputum froth
Seeping from the mouths of peasants dead in bogs
Shoeless, blistered feet bleeding, suppurations,
The peasants trekked through mountain passes
Down a narrow glen to the gates:
The landlord’s manor:
Forged with the design of his ancestral crest,
On rich pastures, sheep and cattle grazing,
Munching on grassy tufts
A banquet hosted by The Lord of the Manor:
Sterling-silver platters of roast mutton, salmon,
Crystal flagons of Madeira Wine, tansy custard,
Fresh oat bread with caraway seeds
The English Ascendancy dines without mercy
Not a scrap is offered from their feasting table
Policies of supply and demand,
Laissez-Faire economics,
The balance of free trade upset by acts of charity
Views staunchly held
By Charles Trevaleyn, Lord Minister, of Famine Relief,
The brigade is summoned
With muskets and pikes, driven,
Back down the mountainside,
An unexpected snow, uncommon to the region,
Wind-swept, icy pellets begin to plummet
Threadbare mantles and ragged breeches
Tattered waist coats and torn cloaks,
Proffer no shield to wind and cold
Weak from hunger, vomiting from flux,
Febrile burning, retching and cramping,
Exposed to the elements - many perish on the road
Surrender the land
Religion renounce, the workhouse offers,
Thin soup for labor,
Over rough field and murky bog,
To Queenstown, instead, in Gaelic named: Cobh
With sovereigns few in hand for passage fare,
A berth on a coffin ship, barely seaworthy,
A relic, built in Napoleon’s reign,
Rive with vermin and dysentery,
To America, land in the west,
Schools of sharks following the ships
Feasting on Irish bodies of sagging skin and
Protruding bones, following the trails of blood
Streaking across the North Atlantic
Into the west, the Celts believed,
Salvation awaits, the Isles of Blessed,
Where the heroes of myth
The Fianna, found their reward,
Life eternal, like Ossian of legend, who
Lived there for one hundred years,
Homesick, returned to Erin,
Dismounted from his horse
To step on the soil of Ireland
Body withered with his footfall
Into dust, into ashes
Once exiled never to be returned
The paradise promised
In Yankee America, unmet,
“No Irish Need Apply”
A rat-infested ghetto
In New York City’s Five Points instead
Drafted into the Grand Army of the Republic
To die on the battlefields of Manasas,
Antiem and Shiloh
The Irish do not forget the hunger
Resonating in the verse of Seamus Heaney
Irish rock stars, Bob Geldof and U2 promoting
Charities to feed the famine victims in Africa
It is no mere coincidence
The taste of grass is still bitter in the Irish mouth