Drumskinny (from Irish Droim Scine, meaning ‘ridge of the knife/edge’)

I

I went down to the river where my phone repeatedly beeped in my pocket: ‘Welcome to the United Kingdom”.

Another message, on the other side of Europe, saying that I was now safely home.

Friendly corporate messages about billing charges, calls will now cost 75c per minute unless I have signed up for roaming.

I remember when the border didn’t beep its presence.

I remember when roaming charges were something that could be brought against you for going over the river with the wrong thing in a body’s hand.

I remember Daddy holding out his driver’s license and biting his lip on the way to the beach in Rossnowlagh.

I remember the soldiers at the border never laughing, even at my best and most silly faces.

I wasn’t there when the soldiers were replaced by phone masts, watching and clocking who’s crossing the border.

II

The bog is a sponge, full to the gills with water, floating at the top of a child’s bath.

Its a green you wouldn’t see anywhere else.

Iridescent bog moss.

A consolation gift from the tree gods who left this place a long time ago. 

Sitting at the cairn with a flask of hot chocolate, I imagine the stone circle.

Not a worship spot, but a building of oak, with a fire for cooking and washing and making clay pots. 

I imagine women birthing here and the clan gathered around them to protect the sacred act.

I imagine the tiny motions and notions of evolution, the oak crying and falling and standing dead as the buttress of a hall, the bed of a chief, the boat of an invader, the banquet table of a band of warriors.

I imagine the foxgloves springing up at the heels of the stump to heal the wound with the numbing digitalis, poison and elixir. 

I imagine bluebells frying up as the light in the gap of the canopy is too much for them.

I imagine the baby oaks, in their 100-year-old youth springing up to race into the spot their mother took while all the while not knowing what hit her.

I imagine the axe becoming sharper and the band of men chopping becoming fiercer and the trees becoming fewer.

I imagine the fungus, the tiny electrical system, the telephone network of the woods, being the first to shrivel as their feeding ground of dead bark is gone.

I imagine nothing but death, ill-health, cows and sheep and shite. 

Then the moss.

Then the Heather.

Then the rushes.

Then the tiny bog flower.

Then the planting.

Spindly Sally rods, Ash, and Nordic pines.

III

I see the farming communities discover the miracle of butter, gold from the gods.

I hear the thumps in the hollow barrel as they pound it out churning and churning until the sacred gold is good enough to put in the bog for the fairies. 

I hear the people hiding for fear from Viking and Norman and English and Scottish gulders, roaring about the drumlins.

I hear sips of beer and wine over those big oak tables as men plot maps of harbours and lands where the beef, butter and the bread are good. 

I see fields of flax and wheat and corn in this bogland before bog land.

I hear people moan and ache in suffering for farming, collecting, harvesting and hoarding wealth for the tables of strangers. 

I hear the screams of women becoming mothers in hidden quarters, dying in shame and dirt.

I hear the skirt tails swish as the goddess ducks out of sight with the Oak. 

IV

I feel the return of earth. 

We are planting.

We are plotting around gridded screens. 

We are mapping a new way into this new age.

We are accepting the grinding halt nature has imposed on us.

We are facing a new force, a tiny concept.

A message in a small thing: we are not the gods. 

The bog will grow new bones.

(2021, Helen McNulty)