Alchemisland

Floozy is our floating rock, thigh-shower

Cold shower, grower not a shower

Groves of bee-loud clover and smothering vanilla-headed heather

Sacred hawthorne resplendent and thorned, adorned with whitefeather petals

Every verdant blend abounds, as if one wore lenses of augmented ferns to lend extra green to what’s beheld.

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Hills we die on, Ireland our zion

Though we, formerly colonised, recognise and support Palestine

We died everywhere in stained green livery, our livers never caught up with our endeavours

Irish blood red as setters, crows settling on our emerald dead

Upon every hill from Tilbury to Verdun

From rubbled Dublin to Raj-run Calcutta, rissome rummed-up on naval vessels

Through gutters in English Dublin stalks again the blood that summons rebellion

It haunts the shaking pen of every godsent mind scribing in defiance of mankind’s minders

Lads from Ballybough and Belturbet run through like cupboard butter at Antietam and Gettysburg

Lynches and Burkes killing O’Rourkes

Cassidys, Fitzgeralds, Quinlivans, Kennedys, all enemies by shirt shade far overseas

Sang of green places they had been but not lately, dreamt green dreams

Loathed kings and queens, skilled mercenaries prized for strength and speed

Their age ended with rifles, no more they blow ogham-banded horns rousing gallowglasses to pour forth from arboreal hiding, like the shellcrown of Poseidon arising just from the waves