Until the Harvest Comes, Dunderry Park

 

I'm very happy to be doing a bonfire reading this Saturday night in Dunderry Park as part of Until the Harvest Comes, and to celebrate the autumn equinox, with thanks to Sofft Productions. I was Queen of the Bonfires as a child (and camp fires).

A few years ago I was passing the house on the Dunderry to Robinstown Road when I had a vision of a warrior with streaming hair and his hound racing past the poplar trees that grow there. I wrote this poem in response, which I will read on Saturday night.

The Park

 

Poplars stand poker straight

and silver as the light would have been

bouncing off spears

 

two millennia ago.  Those carriers

were Fianna, warriors who ran

the length of the coast

 

to defend territories from invaders.

I see them with their hounds,

shadows flickering

 

through the trees.  Blonde, ragged, long

hair flows and brown, matted rat ends

dart past.

 

Preternatural, it is only for an instant.

The oak stands alone when once

it was lost in the woods

 

and cattle are foddered by a red feeder,

freshly painted,

withstanding rust and frost.

 

When I pause by the big black gates

opening up the road inside

I dare not enter,

 

not in deference to the private property sign

but from foreboding of entrance

to another realm

 

where my ancestors call me

to renunciate my worldly goods

and to commune with a universal soul.

 

With broken vision I move forward

from calling these figments out

into the light of day. In such clear skies

 

a plane leaves a wispy trail.

 

Orla Fay