Death lingered a while out of respect
knowing this full life as its own shadow
and then She was gone from us finally
and we left only to lament the unloseable
for how do you grieve those who are gone
but are not now and can never ever be lost
what strangeness this word brings to us
as if we could lose them like a set of keys
instead we hold Her presence forevermore
a soul surrounding proposition to bear
let it permeate our every waking moment
our blood stained immortal with memory
a smell of the glass of Jamesons’ whisky
a song of old Erin sung always out of key
a clip around the ear and a reminder to you
that life is fucking hard and then you die
a cackle when there should have been silence
a fumbled drunken morning smoke of a rollie
a cough like hot tarred gravel to follow it up
that dark humour spat for the difficult times
prophetic wisdom born on hard rainy streets
the smell of cabbage and bacon on tuesdays
and that freshly baked tin loaf on the weekend
the rosary beads hung by the front door beside
the holy water that was sprinkled on all-comers
along with fervent prayers for their troubled souls
most of whom never crossed that threshold again
for fear of the hell that might drag them down
Her skill at removing the back of the wardrobe
the key to the front secured in secret by him
so as to pawn his suit in the weeklong space
between Sunday mass and his Sunday best
She suffered in the end as She had all along
silently in the plain sight of the abusers but
scalding them in private with eyes of black coal
burning truth like a blunted knife in the heart
of those who always knew their place in Her stare
and from the coffin laid on the altar now She
stabbing us rusted wounds in the silent church
to bleed forever in the re-membering void
hearts pumping a spike of sadness to air
a howl like no other you could have heard
Later we sat in our old and ancient place
feeling into the land as we must to be human
burned wood to smoke the night barefoot
to feel the welcoming weight of the old ones
as She was returned to the hallowed shores
and talked and cried and laughed our grief
into a place that would live in the dirt beneath
our feet and our fingernails and our rainy streets
paying our respect for the cycle of souls we are
clay in the beginning and always clay in the end a nod to the Mother who holds us all in her arms ashes to ashes and dust to dust we know what we
must.
This poem could be about any one of the women in my lineage or those I grew up with who hail from the same place and have since passed. Imagine this as a letter to them all.
My maternal Grandmother, Lizzie, is in the picture on the right, on the streets of her beloved Dublin City.
What a beautiful unflinching tribute. The honour and respect paid to this woman/women is so clear yet gently worded, like a whispered narration of the immediate aftermath of the passing of a great person. It could probably apply to most woman of the last few hundred years but their presence and influence was so great that each would have felt like a colossal loss. I might be imagining this but I sense a deeper layer with the funeral also symbolising the end of an era of women paying a heavy toll for their role in society.