The Folly

 

A new poem from me in response to the proposal to build on 98 acres of land surrounding Cuchulainn's Castle, Dundalk. It is written from the point of view of Laeg, Cuchulainn's companion and charioteer.

The Folly

 

Out from Tara, the widest road leads

to a mount from where the sea

can be seen beneath Mournes and Cooleys,

at the edge of Ulster. This is Delga.

 

Cú is needed for a battle today.

Something about a bull and a mad queen from the West –

who it seems is a friend of Ferdia.

Láeg is here to deliver this troubling news.

 

He sits in the centre of the mount, waiting

for Cú to come from his shave and wash,

thinks about which horses to take, for one is lame,

when he is possessed by a strange fit.

 

It is so black and dense, he thinks even a warp-spasm, the Ríastrad,

could not unloose it. He sees the future: a conquest

that causes his people to hide in the earth like moles,

the building of a fortress around this place.

 

The image burns in his mind then of a pirate

who buys Cú’s birthplace, builds on it

a castle, a touchstone, a tall folly.

More battles follow, more blazes through the

 

mount’s circle of trees – oaks, cedars, willow.

He sees a period of calm then, a bright poor time,

children swinging from blue ropes

calling to Cuchulainn, to Láeg, to the past, to their hounds and horses.

 

Then comes the catastrophe,

black as pitch, a hellish error of judgement.

Láeg falls to the ground, froths at the mouth with fright –

and he is never frightened.

 

He observes the greed of man,  

new skills in the art of erasure,

of wiping the traces of ancestors, of trees and people, from all places

with machines, diggers and concrete.

 

He sees “the white-cuffed marauders”

who, in service to modernity, snuff out legendary days,

memories of summer, boyhoods, girlhoods made

to the songs of the yellowhammer and lapwing, to the whish of bats.

 

He sees houses, some twice the size of the pirate’s folly, packed together.

The ghosts of himself and Cú, and all who loved these fields

buried, locked, breath-jammed beneath their floors.

He starts to sputter and choke –

 

and is released with a start, his heart aflutter.

He delights to see again the iron-blue bay below,

flat and reassuring. Láeg is calmed indeed by the view,

by the mountains above

 

to where he and our hero are headed today,

to defend everything in them,

falcons, wolves, badgers,

a coveted brown bull.

 

Note: “White-cuffed marauders” comes from Thomas Kinsella’s “Night Conference, Wood Quay: 6 June 1979.’