Some people have been kind enough to ask me to provide the text for some of my poems I've recited for them at various special places around the West and South-West of this beautiful land, while guiding them on walking tours during our so-called Summer months!
The first is one about Smerwick Harbour, a large, natural bay in the west of Corca Dhuibhne (West Kerry, or the Dingle Peninsula). Smerwick translates roughly as "butter bay", a site where the Vikings re-caulked their boats. Like all of our coast, it's being eroded away by the sea; in this case revealing sub-sand boglands but also more recent (e.g. early 16th century) ruins and graves.
Smerwick Harbour
Rain-measled ripples
pattern the sand,
littoral buffer
between sea and land,
rafts of grassy sod
have broken free
and make, inexorably
for the hungry sea,
jubilant waves
joyously foam,
welcoming the
former seabed home,
plucking
long arm and leg bones,
tumbling
yellowed and honeycombed
dome of skull
that once cradled brain,
upturned now
to catch the rain,
they weren’t here
last time we passed:
each day the tide
claims more of the past,
dark ledge of bog
exposed by probing surf:
the Butter Bay
reclaims its turf,
a lunula
of cobbled stones,
the sea-stripped skin
revealing broken bones,
suffocating sand
invaded here,
the drowning sea
now scouring it clear.
