The children were never told
about those places. The unbreachable
silence of women protected us
from terrible things.
We heard the dread whisperings
and peopled the swarming spaces with ghosts.
Yet we never knew. They buried
unnamed innocents by the sea’s edge
and in the unchurched graveyards
that straddled boundary walls. Those infants
half-human, half-soul were left
to make their own way on the night shore.
Forbidden funerals, where did mothers
do their crying in the two-roomed cottages
so beloved of those Irish times?
Never in front of the living children.
Where then? In the haggard, the cowshed,
the shadowed alcoves of their church?
That Christian religion was hard.
It mortified the flesh
and left mothers lying empty,
their full breasts aching, forever afraid
of what the winter storms might yield,
their own dreams turning on them like dogs.
