On Hearing the Chieftains
Of means to veil war’s bloodied pasture, the harp is most holy, unwound from a young girl’s sleep in a dream of water rising. The bodhran’s distant thunder, like a storm. deep in our veins, draws grass of April tresses on a much-trod precipice where the love of decent men settles forever, a dust. Song binds a youth to the sky that chooses him from afar in cries of dread and hypothesis, describes a scale weighted and cruel, a balance of so mean a death and music summoned from pipes and flute, both weapons of desire to pierce the heart. A woman without age, traced by the bow and ankled in dew, pinches night’s hem with her finger, gives voice to the fiddler’s vision of the moon. What ghost in her needs dance I cannot tell. Dawn hesitates, a morn too shining, while her hand, a wind in the rushes, caresses the night. The melody haunts like this: a kindled blood’s invention whose stars configured and moist, ebbed in time’s pulsating hue, rhyme sad for a mother’s lost children, their names consumed in a hearth’s enraptured flame. (for Gerard Dion and Sharon FitzSimon) |
