Poetry: ‘My Mother Tongue’ by Maisie McAllister

I’ve written about this before
When I was younger just as a chore
But when I stepped into this world I saw
What I had wrote was not a joke
And I couldn’t cope and I suddenly choked
When I was asked questions about me home

Recently I sat in rooms with people I’ve only known
For a few months only a few know how we’ve grown
To the others everything is unknown
Except, the grass is green on the 17th
And the one thing that we all eat
Is still the same since children starved on streets
Or in their cot, but it’s not
Their fault.
They don’t know because no one is taught
Outside the border of the Irish Sea or Atlantic way
So they stay and don’t look further
To the outside we dig,
And they don’t dig any deeper.

I only feel the wish to be a speirbhean
Unlike my new faraway friends
Who never got a chance, the opportunity to pretend
They were Niamh chinn oir coming to lure the men
I used to like the Irish poets pen
The image of Ireland as one of us not one of them
As a woman and not a man but in the end
I was once again
Proven wrong
I didn’t use my youthful eyes and catch on
That everything I was taught, all that shone
Was just a fantasy, sold to me,
A creation by men for men so they didn’t have to see
The women of our land as long as the land was our woman
They could hold up their hands
And say “we made a stand”
But I can still hear the rhymes of Eavan.

Now as I learn more about the language I speak,
I long more for the language I could have spoke
If they had not come, if they had not broke
These people, my people, and covered them in a cloak
Of silence; our fast dance is one of few things that survived
People are still surprised to realise
There was a language here before we were colonised
I try to intertwine a phrase or two
into my speech but you
Can’t understand what I mean
My Irish isn’t clean, my grammar doesn’t gleam
In this soft light, but I still like
It’s punctuality, musicality, the spirituality with which we once spoke
My mother’s tongue was cut from my throat
Before I was born
The last cry, the last note had left
before it could be sung
They were tied up, shot or hung
For saying “grian” or “mac”
Instead of sun or son.

Tá brón orm,
Ní feidir liom a rá ach go bhfuil mo shuile gorm
Tá aithne agam ar shráideanna na cathrach
Is féidir liom a rá go “cleachtadh a dhéanann máistreacht”, ach
Níl mé líofa
I mo bhunteanga
Mairfidh an brón go deo
Mar ligim do chultúr bás leo
Na daoine, mo mhuintir,
Na tíre seo, mo thír,
Mo chroí
Is breá liom tú
Tá grá agam di.