On barren fields

by Mary Pooley

On barren fields, the hope and heroes of the revolution lie,
shackled by English pennies placed over each eye,
no children’s children will they ever meet in our land
but wait with open hearts in God’s world.

Outside the museum, the rain and the sun
write indecipherably across the surface of the world,
They standardised our memory into text books;
In those faded documents we see the lives and deaths of those exalted heroes
who gave us freedom.
Those memories are frayed, fragile, don’t speak of them,

Reproduced with kind permission of the author. This poem was composed in Poetry as Commemoration workshops held at the Thomas MacDonagh Museum on 20th and 21st of September, 2023. The workshops were led by poet Thomas McCarthy.