The Return

i.m. Thomas Costello

Fifty summers gone,
and you walk to a field
in Ireland and claim the land
as your own, the farmhouse rubble
and thatch, now, as you return
to greener days of childhood play...
languid boy swinging
under the apple tree,
quick to jump and chase birds
and rabbits on days
               like these;

only the retch and clank of a gun
reminds you of darkness, the butt-end
of 'an Uncle's' grief; that's you −
hopping to school like a sparrow,
Gaelic boy speaking good Gaelic,
you again, aged five and two,
and the loss of your Ma & Da
respectively, 13, at the grave of Auntie Mary
(the woman you called Mother Mary),
boarding weeks later a boat -
Dublin - Liverpool - Halifax.

Twenty years on
                             and I the pilgrim;
(via Belfast and Sligo) I head to Galway.
I do not reach the farm.
I walk and walk, and watch
as your Milltown-Clashaganny-Tuam
converges to a vanishing point,
my dreamed of green land
you called home as far-fetched
as roots of a tree, our ancient name
                              de Angelos?

At the B&B in Galway Town
our surname is spoken
with reverence by a silver-haired host
'We share the same name,
                                         Costello'
a sense of someone else's home
as I took the boat for Inis Mor,
discovering what ever Irishman knows,
every Irishman is alone,
Irishmen and Ireland alone,
before and after the splitting of the stone.