Poem for the Day - Old as Cows Are (from the Irish Suite)

I visited Ireland for three weeks in September 2011, and walked along the same roads and laneways every morning while staying in county Monaghan, at a writers' centre. I photographed interesting landscapes and came across this derelict house. It was too overgrown to go inside, but I could see inside, nevertheless.

Old as Cows are

A house sits in a field

uncared for.

Grey calm of slate roof

and a chimney’s cold air, puffing.

Year after year this cottage,

married to weeds, dies in bracken

and an ivy graveyard. Death for life.

Trees holding onto their view,

blackberry vines curl with fruit, saplings

spire by sentinels of wired posts.

A door sits back like a mouth where

no food enters. Windows look out

from a darkness within. A magnolia tree

is the last, healthy touch of a family,

planting. The raw stillness of it. 

And they who farmed here, gone,

foisted with the fight of poverty. White-

washed bricks, old as cows are, strengthen

in the sun; a face that sings to no-one, or

for whoever comes.