The ’ vine transplanted out of Egypt ’
Is, they tell me, Ireland.
I, who did my penance on the mainland,
Now look back
From a lost Atlantic rock
At all those towns named Dysart
Meaning ‘desert’. Surely to Christ
They knew of us, the Fathers,
Way back then, in the Middle East –
Occluded in our weather,
Or call it a spirit-mist,
Where the selkies bark, the oceans break,
Invisible therefore real
As the books insist.
Eight miles back
Is Ireland, life, temptation,
Sloping green, through its stone-walled fields,
Its solid yellow farmsteads.
Too much milk and honey
The eremite said,
And yes, our crossing was wild
In a blown spume
Of backwash, diesel fumes,
As the sick-bucket’s stomach-trash
Went over with a splash
And the croaked-up devils
Spat themselves out
And the world turned medieval.
Beehive huts, on their high redoubt,
(They grew their own evil )
And the six-hundred-odd steps
Of slabbed atonement
To get there... No, as the engine stops
And the pilgrims stuffed with Quells
in the oily swell,
The guilty, the inadequate,
Each with our middle-aged dread,
Are lifted up, and gently swung ashore,
I feel I have been here, in my head,
Too many times before.
- Harry Clifton