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… why should we care/ If a rose, a hedge, a crocus are uprooted/ Like corpses, remote, crushed, mutilated? from The War Horse by Eavan Boland
On an autumn night, the road is clear, the fair green seething in its concrete grave. Nowhere to hitch a horse, nowhere to pasture the thousand ghostly sheep
that flood the narrow road, caught in the streetlamp’s amber. Along Church Street, they turn, horses, sheep, cattle, quick as clouds
passing across the moon, seeking the green that fed them through famine, tithes, and civil war – whinnies echo on St Rynagh’s gravestones.
Through years of unpaved roads and ambushed mail cars they canter, the jingle of a sulky carried on the breeze, hooves sparking on vanished cobbles.
We behind our curtains hear only the passing music of cartwheels, a bridle bell. We wake in the morning, expect to find the streets awash with muck,
farmers and tanglers slapping hands, an old woman with a piss-pot walking the throng shouting Cack in me can, young man!
Instead, an absence ripens into bitter sloes that dot the hedgerows we pass as we pull on masks, walk aimless circuits, yearn for the keen of a single hoof-beat.
Jessica Traynor’s debut collection, Liffey Swim (Dedalus Press, 2014), was shortlisted for the Strong/Shine Award and her second collection, The Quick, was a 2019 Irish Times poetry choice.