Alchemisland

Neighbours around Lough Neagh won’t spare a cup of tae

Eel pickers say they remember the first farmers when they came

Or as they would put it, when they invaded and began inveigling

Nine pints or eight it takes before they break their silence and bloviate

Down in Foley’s downing pints with ties off, they speak of old lives, busy tides, blood libels

For the cutting down of the mighty forests, the farmers are liable

The eel pickers descend from the hunters and gatherers, tribal

Nomads descended from the Mount Sandel settlers in Antrim

Much of our history is twisted to fit the Bible

Nothing before the flood, every pagan religion a spiral

Slide to the one true God.

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They are different to us and we do not mix

They hew from stone what we built from sticks

‘Round here we stick to our own

The fen is our home, same loam

Which our ancestors lost to those come o’er the foam

Ploughs drove over the sacred bones of the once-known

Names, queen of the glade

Ireland’s maid

Sláine could not save her

Slain by male gods of the satyrmen

They built the great henges

Their heroes demigods, half men with magic armed

Strength in arms, fast in fashion, dashing into conflict, elastic

In proportion, contorting during warp spasms

Sporting and boar hunting, construction of rude castles and earth ramparts.

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The tragic enters the literary canon, the romantic

In them contrasts the seasonal aspect of the older mythic

Tradition, the mesolithic mission to transmit orally their story, end the remission

Of progress through the demolition of memory by time, fishing and fowling 200 years 

Before Partholon came, the thirst of his blade immortalised his name, his fame

Such that even now, thousands of years after he came here with steel and flame,

We deem valid his claim of Ireland

When they had not dreamt of such as the Parthenon

The monks on private islands parsed out the world’s lineage in beautiful illuminated manuscripts

In busy scriptoriums quiet as crypts not a word leaves a lip

Just the scratching and dipping of nibs in inkwells

Acid trip fantasies of lost galaxies

Friezes of foliate leases on the world

When named breezes could speak disease 

When tusked creatures came with in deep freezes

Seizing seas saw surcease

Ice below feet from Ireland to Greece

The making and wearing of cowhide pampooties

They died robed in plunder and gleaming booty, beauty they prized highly

The pride of the eye from which none can pry themselves

No pride in a lie, or to die in bed late in the night of life, shelved

For three decades suffering in strife, dustboning and wishing unlife, delving

Deeper into the underworld, further from the spear-hurling halls of his dead comrades

They believed in elflings, small things which had come before the ring-wearing poet soldiers

Like Djinn they preferred dark disused places, old places where no faces paraded, they faded

At the sound of feet but beware if you meet them not to greet them, foods they serve do not eat them

Let your feet beat a quick rhythm and escape before you meet

A worse fate

Cape-wearing heroes with flaxen hair, gold gruaig silverhand goldenband

Azure, quartz pure endures the night in the field, it is their moon lure

At Lugnaquilla beloved warriors of Lugh, fierce as the Fianna, fire-forged they came forth from the four Druid cities, from Findias and Murias

At marbled breast coruscated smilelike lunula carved with ogham charms

Dashes etched in ashwood, wands tucked in pied sashes, woollen léine in pissyellow or quare motley.