Fingerpost

And here, at this crooked crossroad of Mountshannon,

village on the edge of a river fattened into a lake,

the coppery fourway signpost directs to past, present and future.

Separate directions, but nothing is what it seems –

there is a twining between these fingers.

Up on the bog above Bohatch, where sky meets mountain

and water shimmers metallic below on the Shannon, the Dolmen slants

among heather glowing purple in the setting sun

and your hand resting on the warm wedge of rock

almost feels the ancestors caught between stone age and bronze

burying their dead; almost sees their fish-giving lake,

the hump of their distant mountains.

And in the Harbour where Shannon waters flow in and out

on the whim of the wind, and where boats come in and out

from the north or the south, in that Harbour on a summer’s night

look out at the lake and see the ancient skin-covered boats

ease their way with oar and sail to Iniscealtra, the holy isle –

monks to build their churches and worship, Vikings to ruin and pillage.

You walk to the Village past Winty’s Cottage, tiny windows,

once-thatched roof, past the forge, where these coppery fingers

were forged to the broad street laid out with buildings

made of stone by Woods of Limerick, a village built

for the spinning of linen from flax with a church

and market house, and four boisterous fair days a year.

Mountshannon built for workers by Woods, and now the woods

are all that’s left of Woodpark House, raised by Reade

and razed to the ground in the twenties. The finger

points you down the road to where bluebells and wild garlic

flower between beech and oak; where water flows

and people walk where people walked and will always walk.

Forged, to show us the way. The past is the warp,

the present the weft, fingers twined to make sense of our future.

© Nicki Griffin