Poem by Rena Fleming

Great Changes

“Deaths and marriages make great changes.”
That’s what they used to say,
In a general way,
Not specific to the Famine.
There were too many deaths then.
They were too close.
Dying was a failure.
That wasn’t spoken of.
It was lived out of.
It cut a deeper line
Of before and after
Than Independence, the change
From rulers to leaders.
It removed or erased so many
It changed Ireland.
It changed land ownership
From up and down to the middle.
The strong farmers rose.
Their cattle conquered crops.
Marriages were made to unite fields.
In a domestic commerce
Resources were invested for
The future in a son and
A son a priest for good measure
Was a measure of success.
Women served purposes.
Their speaking was sanctioned
In self-betraying confessions
To oppressive clergy.
Their lives went to the farms
Their love to the productive sons.
Their marriages were fodder
For literature.
The absolution of lost knowledge
Comes slowly on the land.
Roots grow from our feet.
My grand father struck a man
Who, in drink, accused my forebears

Of the theft of fields from his forebears,
After the Hunger.
In the Cromwellian phrase of West Limerick-
My grandfather “falled” him.
Who will know now in that place
The story or the truth?
These many years later
We appear to be recovering
From that disease of the blood-
The fear of want.
The roots growing from our feet
Are shorter.
We can love and leave the land.
There are changes.

Click on the file below to listen to Rena read her poem:

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Rena Fleming grew up on a farm in Co.Limerick and now enjoys the landscape and the shores of Galway Bay.

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