Howth – New Moon of June – 2116
They will come for us soon
The agents of the New Machines
In their watercraft they'll skim across
The drowned suburbs
And I'll leave this note
Though no one might find it
Now that the blindness
Comes with the madness
***
Once upon a time I stood with my grandmother
On these very cliffs – she would murmur
The names – lost streets of the city
In every name the ballast of history
Low dives kips mansions of stone
Raheny Kilbarrack Sutton
Avenues roads crescents parks
Baldoyle Finglas Coolock
Under the blue water
The sunken grave of my mother, her daughter
***
Said grandmother Hannarafe used say
She remembered the days
Of the Old Machines
Training and grooming the children
To service them, to stroke and pet them
Oh yes, she'd say, on the buses, on the trams
The children gazing into the machines,
Whispering to them, feeding them scenes
Of this world and our dreamworld
Downloading our memory hoard
We interinanimated the machines
Even as they digitized our brains
My grandmother Hannarafe would say
Back in the day
***
My own grandchild is, I pray, safe
Radiant! Beauty! named for Hannarafe herself
The pain of the loss of her, apple of my blind eye
With her sharp tongue, her ability to scry
She left last moon with the other children
They slipped solemn and silent
Into the small boats, heading south
Risking all on the word of mouth
News of settlements where they might make a start
In machine-free zones of the human heart
***
They will come for us soon
The agents of the New Machines
To enforce the Edict of New Thought
The New Recalibration Avoidant of Link Rot
The Final Removal of Un-Logic
The Great Re-Gathering of the New Demagogic
The favourite word of the New Regime
The New News and New Reliability Scheme
***
When I was a girl Hannarafe would stand
Here – point across to the Mainland
She'd say Thank fuck
We were safe – stuck
On the Howth side of the water
Over there they were eating each other
What luck, she'd say, to be stranded
Here – the time of the Flood
She'd say, my geomantic grandmother
About the Frantic Days before
The Separation – the bodies – for months
Washing up against the cliffs – the storm fronts
Moving over us – a procession of angry gods.
Those years of the Bad
***
They will come soon
The agents of the New Machines
For the last time I look
Here, in this last book
That has survived the Great Uploading
The Law Against Print designed to bring
Every human utterance through the Filters
Of the New Democratic Holy Scanners
The End of the Road – The End of Memory:
Modernist Irish Poetry of the Early 21st Century
I'd rather burn the evidence
Of my trade, redact to its elements
The ink the paper the board
Smoke on the wind
That drifts at last sovereign and free
The powerful memory of some ancient tree
***
Hannarafe, my grandmother taught me
This old rhyme: Howth for its honey
Its hives, its hawks, its hounds
Its handsome boys, its humdudgeon
And hobthrush, its hasps and hobblers,
Its hylegs, its hyponyms, its hames.
She named herself aboriginal
In a world gone totally institutional
***
They will come soon
The agents of the New Machines
For the girl children, classified Breeders,
For us old ones, designated Upcyclers
The boys for Theocratic Leadership Immersion
Or for Technocratic Service in Data Conversion
I should have been Upcycled at fifty
What they call the New Generosity
I am already too old for that
Now I'll be rendered for my fat
My bones for fertilizer
At the direction of the Agrivizers
***
But they'll not find the children
They're gone with the May moon
Away from the golden gorse blossom
The foaming lace of the May blossom
Over the seven waves
Under the seven stars
This poem is part of the series Dublin in the Coming Times, a free, citywide programme of creative writing run by Fighting Words, in partnership with Dublin Unesco City of Literature. More information at fightingwords.ie
