Seán Haldane

River Bann, N Ireland

We lived here first, we of the big bones,
Craggy faces, brow‑ridges, high skulls.
We speared eels and salmon with ash harpoons
Edged with tanged flakes of flint, we pulled
Sea bass, blue-and-silver striped, onto the strand
With lines of twisted gut and bone hooks. We culled
Strawberries and bilberries, gathered mast
In oak and hazel woods (we grilled
Fowl on hazel sticks) and by the river
We made our wattle dwellings in this land
We had found our own: our great mother.

Before us came the fish, fowl, songbirds, eagles,
Wolves, foxes, martens, elk, hare, lynx, otter –
The mother’s scaly, feathered, furry ones.
And we, the naked, raised our heads
To scan the starry nights for the cold moon,
Mistress of the north‑revolving sky,
Of women’s changes, briny blood, and tides –
The death‑white breakers tumbling on the sand,
Eddying the great mouth of our estuary,
Forcing the salt taste upstream to the falls
Where salmon swirled into our withy weirs
And in the rainbow spray, on stepping stones,
We stabbed into the foam with blood-stained spears.

After us the small people, slope skulled,
Narrow headed, conceived in the dark,
The calculating ones who moved great stones,
Smelling of sour milk (we of fish and meat –
Our women’s breast-milk smell was honey sweet),
The smooth‑browed, calculating, sacrificing,
Landing on waveless inlets with their cattle,
Driving into the mother’s heart, burning
The dead elm trees they’d murdered by ringing bark.
Sacrificing! Why could they not let live?
Naming the mother’s rivers after cows
As if her crystal floods were rancid milk,
Building earth mounds in the river bends
With passages to let in the sun’s ray,
To catch it like an ox’s blood, worshipping
The sun’s death and birth, not the moon’s way.

After them the broad skulled ones, melters of ore,
Warlike, fort builders – people of things
(Swords, helmets, cloaks, cauldrons, torcs, rings)
And of ranks (farmers, chiefs, praise‑poets, kings),
The women not much more than mares they rode:
People of the horse (as the dark ones they enslaved
Were people of the cow – us of the salmon),
Worshippers of neither sun nor moon,
Neither fire nor tide: of thunderbolts
Like their swords, then the dead king on the cross

Invasions from the inundating sea,
Wave upon wave, a flotsam of these others
Who suffocated us just like the sand
That drifted in our dwellings on the wind,
The dunes advancing. We were lost in them,
Taken as their mates, women and men,
Becoming them – their fathers, mothers, children.

We lived here first. Not much of us survives:
A craggy brow here, deep-set eyes there,
Jutting nose, high cheeks, wild curly hair,
Something in the blood, the bone, the mind –
Of all of you. And now this weak hand writes
From one who comes from us, and on starry nights
Comes back to us, the moon above the waves,
Or, with a north wind blowing, by day
Stands at the great waterfall in rainbow spray:
His spear is this poor pencil, and his lines –
Of longing, terror, pride, lust and pain –
Are lines of breakers pounding in his brain.