The Ghent Review Volume1, Number 1, summer 2016 | Page 14

only the cottiers' small fields
ringed by battered walls of stone

iii
when the hunger came that time
wrensong and the sough of trees
filled the air as they do now
bog cotton shone below killhanna
lough allua still gleams in moonlight
and a vixen's bark sounds as inconsolable
some blame anu unappeased
who withheld her grace at last
or the failure of the latin litany
to move the providential will
but it was remorseless morality
weighted with colonial law
starved families from their hovels
pungent turf smoke like the mists
still clings to these same hillsides
and in desultory westering light
the brocken spectre even now
has the power to spook
but it could be no more baleful
than the eviction agent's shadow
mean