Tobar Naoṁ Ḃríde

— “There’s one thing in that pome, permanence, if you know what I mean. That pome, I mean to say, is a pome that’ll be heard wherever the Irish race is wont to gather, it’ll live as long as there’s a hard root of an Irishman left by the Almighty on this planet, mark my words. What do you think, Mr Shanahan?

It’ll live, Mr Lamont, it’ll live.

I’m bloody sure it will, said Lamont.”

— Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds

Can you hear

The water running over flagstones?

Life is the green algae

Clinging on — onto the Limestone’s Devonian imprint.

Time is the thin veil of water

Under which the flagstones shimmer.

These plastic trinkets

The crucifix and sacred heart

How can last decade’s metropolis

and the empires of the decade before that

be forgotten,

When their small city of trinkets

Populate the alcove walls?

The madonna statue, across the well’s shallow pool

arms outstretched

but no godrays appear

at once christ’s mother and an older goddess

Life is the moss that grows above her head

Time is its growth.

Spirits and souls draw life

from drops that gather on the mosses’ tips,

they flow in flickering rivulets

that slide down the cold stone walls.

The pools at the Virgin’s feet

ripples from the droplets above

Underneath glimmer

the dulled, rusted coins

Pennies old and pennies new.

Like a small silver coin

Cast a prayer for the dearly lost

before returning to the birdsong once again.