This poem was prompted by the latest news from Gaza and Ukraine. I tried to do a short introduction to the poem but I find I have no words, except the words it contains.
Again On the beach at the battle of Clontarf, a thousand years ago today, warriors fell like autumn leaves from an invisible tree, their blood rusting the earth. The sea was further from the land then before the great reclamation and Clontarf is quiet today but elsewhere soldiery is still being sent to fall and be felled, bomb-dropping into homes and hospitals now, and mothers are shrieking again. Again. I don't think they've ever stopped since or before. Was there ever a moment when the world was empty of that sound? And now all day the embers of shockwaves words are tossed into our technologised taverns, our ornamented cafés, our overstocked homes, and phones. What leaves of rebellion against this darkness that's always returning can we leave behind? I know how it feels. What use, what use? When we can’t wrap our hopeless arms around a single bloodied man, raise a single obliterated child from the rubble, offer a single sayable sentence to its mother, shrieking her unasked-for sacrifice? We can’t save the world. We can’t even save our own children. War is willing to trade everything for nothing but its own blooding. And so we are left with ourselves, walking around inside our shame, our fears echoing through parliamentary and personal chambers, managing somehow to walk out from our homes, to our cafés, our taverns and shops, heartfirst, though the news always has a new reason to be careful, casting off our cares enough to create to be carried by our urge to unfold a moment of love, of laughter, of verity, like an ocean wave on an Irish sea, hurrying towards the beach at Clontarf, knowing we'll break in our landing, and whatever we make from what we are given will be drawn back into the sea.
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