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Amlosgfa, to the right,
the last whispered breath on the lips
of the burning,
Crematorium, A14 and McDonalds, to
the right
of The Black Stallion or The Golden
Hind or something,
maybe the little
nameless fish-and-chips place too--
when the green never stopped, what
could burn?
The signpost is white
and we have no
directions
it is raining again
and we will all live
forever.
There are no spaces left
this time for the Cymraeg,
or any of the blue-
faces for that matter,
or for
our blarney--
we will not let the last
ash fall through the
grate,
Green Nana, greenwitch,
I swear we didn't forget your
starving ships,
we will not forget them
now.
Look, we brought back the promised
tokens--
bread, meat---eat! We are trying, I
think. Sometimes.
Sometimes we have the
ceilidh
or eisteddfod or whatever, but
we can barely
write down all those letters, the
phonetics are nonsense,
we just have little peace
offerings:
a last name, a love for
a potato, pints, green ink,
tokens, proxy, amlosgva, and the hard
bones
that would not burn and washed
up on the shores. They were Aherns, if I can
remember,
and my mother's mother had red
hair
like my pale
snake-eyed cousins,
and my mother tried to learn
gaelic,
and I tried to go back for the w's
and y's and ll's
which they of course
had dropped
in the sea when the boats already
were sinking by Iceland,
but we ate parsnips and turnip soups
instead,
and I am a proxy now, for a
people
who can speak for themselves in any
case
but not for the sailing
ribcages
who they buried once
the ships were thrown to the
Atlantic,
kissing crosses and dirty
babies,
sailing west to tar and 3 cents a
day,
crying, "give us no more
mouths to feed!" Amlosgfa,
amlosgfa.
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