Willy Mulcahy they put him to the lash, dashed through his door burnt out the gaff
Laughed while flames ate at
Hyena gnashers ag gáire, waited to piss upon the ash
Ask where’s the cash, Paddy
He answers in Irish, they answer in rifle
He is tied up to the ash tree, bashed with gun butts smashed like a dropped trifle dish
Until wits drip out of broken lips, tips of once-teeth manage one last cheeky grin
You’re a bunch of sheep
One answers, and you’re little Bo Peep?
He doesn’t hear anything, not the click of a trigger nor the order for it, just sudden sleep.
It was my granny from Ballygaddy told me that, her Daddy had been IRB, and her Danny
Went on be real IRA we’d pictures of him having tae with Big Mick at a picnic outside Limerick
He’d had pins pricked his fingertips for his sins, the tans busted in his door and threw his pregnant wife on the stone floor
He was hurt badly, his hand held over the hearth, the other held fast to the hot hob
He never opened his gob except to scream, and lob vitriol upon them, begorrah and begob
He could proudly proclaim he was an irishman to his stalk, proud to walk to his father’s halls
Begone they said so Danny was dead, shot and buried in a shed out West beyond Kenmare.
No flares were sent up for the mounded dead in Kildare, flaxensouled fairhaired young daring things, dead from Cork to Derry, mostly unburied
Shrines to holy Mary robed in roses pose as monuments to the unknown disposed ferried
To heaven too early, the gates rimmed with pearls yawn open for dead boys and girls
From Bansha down to Blessington the banshee never busier, the priest blessing the smallest coffin size, the drivers wise to the ambush style, rig roads with miles of barbed wire and many mines with sensitive destructive porcupine spines a truck driving over would ignite
Goodnight black and tans, ye should have stayed in France
Your torso far advanced up the road, your pantseat still in the van
You’ll regret the day you boxed up knickers and vickers and sailed for Ireland
In Massey’s messy thatched barn cum bar rebels sing black velvet band, wild rover, well below the valley, a blacksmith courted me, a set of reels later be planxty
All manner of plans are chattered about, Fenian fantasies of supreme victories.
The Men of Ulster in all Ireland were most gaelic, most like elden lords through whose annals we channel the many landings upon our sand
During the nine years war, Spanish allies tried to land unsuccessfully twice, the third time
The armies became divided, Iberians were trapped in Kinsale, their sailing boats burnt
O’Neill made a valiant march but he couldn’t pull a victory out of his arse
His exhausted forces who had force marched to Munster through blizzards, nursed blisters and ulcers and palsies, and had slept in ditches in darkness like pitch
Were easily surmounted when his amateur cavalry fell apart; they inflicted on Mountjoy’s forces a single casualty
The Spanish surrendered thereafter, having misinterpreted a signal and sallied forth at the losing quarter.
Her Majesty’s forces had triumphed as usual, the Faerie Queene removed the lands even of the loyal
O’Neill outlived Lizzie in the end but soon he was in exile
Flight of the swans, the last of the gaels leave their little pond and sail away, the bards cry
An isle in bondage they leave in their wake, hosts of promises their failed rebellions will break
He dies in Rome of all places, a defender of faith and a participator in a holy war against the babylon whore of the neighbouring shore, whom all his life he warred against in sordid, smiling silence.
Alchemisland 
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