In memory of Mildred Darby (1867–1932)

She sees only a grey sadness, a grim cavity
and cannot sleep beneath its high ceilings.
Each night, she checks her daughter’s room,
what’s wild and brutal creeps through her,
shadows and monsters darken her halls.
She sits up late, grows cold, lifts her pen.

It began with druids, with ritual and sky and fire,
at the foot of the Slieve Bloom. Honouring the land,
prayers for the people. Calling on the elemental.

She unearths what has been buried,
brushes off the dust, the layers of dirt
to reveal a brooch, a doll, a jug. Each
tiny detail preserved. Her brush explores
the dark earth. Her head in the ground,
her hands in the dirt. She touches bone,
hoists a child’s skull out of the past.  

Never mind the sacred. He wants sky, mountains
in the distance, endless fields. He builds his castle.
With each stone, the land shifts beneath his feet.

She sleeps in the room of a dead child.
Mind a storm of nightmares as branches
grapple at the window. In the morning,
she sits at the bureau, her knees scuffing
against it. She wants to examine its detail,
kept clean by the ghost of a mother’s longing.
The dainty drawers slide into her hands,
each piece polished, no dust gathering.

Nobody is safe inside the castle. Brothers
destroying brothers, women disintegrating,
babies born dead. The cold creeps into the
lungs and takes them down with shivers.

Raped, captured, kept. She is known
only for what happened to her. Her baby buried.
Some say she haunts the old nursery. Night
pulls her from the walls to search. How can
she bear the young girl in her baby’s bed?
Soft skin, warm breath, milk teeth chattering.

Famine ravages the lands, poor men turned
out of houses, children’s bony arms reach.
Are there no rituals left to protect them?  

Two sisters live in the castle. Charlotte
has a mangled foot. Determined to keep up,
she hauls her ruined limb behind her,
steering clear of frayed ends. Emily runs
and jumps ahead, skirts along the highest edge
until she slips, tumbles through unforgiving air,
body arcing in a last goodbye.

The summer of the burning, men break furniture
before setting the castle on fire. Their grief
catches in rough throats, as flames climb. A sky
ablaze with a new day, as the ghosts of their fathers
stand behind them, full of desperate laughter.

She looks in all the usual places. Assumes they
are hiding behind curtains. But then, a sharp cry.
Nothing but blood in her ears, her heart furious
and uncertain. Only out of her sight for a minute.
The world muffles and dulls as instinct leads her
to the garden. Does her mind blister in place?
A little girl’s body blown out beneath the trees.

The men raise the castle up from ruin,
scrape lichen away to reveal good stone,
chisel out skeletons only to cover them over.
Three cartloads of skeletons removed
from the oubliette. They cement it shut.