Cold and Want In Dungarvan

Blight crosses the wave-groomed coast. Grips Dungarvan.

The rector writes that famine is sore in the land.

Spud stalks rot as if locusts have devoured them.

Stooped forms in muck lanes have faces like hooked fish.

The gentlest breeze could blow their skeletons to dust.

Men are picking stones from Abbeyside Beach for one shilling a day.

Bad landlords tumble down cabins leaving the people homeless.

Devonshire’s agent is putting cattle seized for rent in the pound.

Fearful shopkeepers keep a weary watch all night.

The town is like a fox crushed in a deadfall slab-stone trap.

The Union Workhouse is full of sick starving people.

The doctor notes dropsy, diarrhoea, whooping cough, opthalmia.

Winter snows in. Barefoot paupers are told to return

Each day for rations, to have their “destitution” tested.

A woman who has walked twenty miles for Indian meal

Dies in tatters in a drift of snow. Dogs gnaw a boy’s legs.

When hungry paupers riot the Hussars draw their swords.

Power falls like a stuck pig on the butcher’s block.

Fr Toomy waits at the back gate of the Workhouse

With holy water to bless the corpses in the dead cart.

He checks to make sure the withered forms are dead.

Starving people grub up the roots of turnips to eat.

Farmers are eating seed potatoes. Next year’s crop.

A baker doles out black slate-hard biscuits no one can eat.

Skin-bags of bones litter the lanes and fields like rotten sheep.

They melt into the primal clay by the sides of ditches.

A woman carts her dead son, begging money to buy a coffin.

But coffins are a luxury. So the dead are wrapped in hay

To shield them from gawpers as they are hurried to the grave.

Two-wheeled dead carts slither, grating snow-stippled lanes.

While snow flocks to gnarled wind-blasted branches,

And gales rack the slum of fields and gouged thatch,

Open graves tick time in Kilrush and Slievegrine.

The tongues of church bells know only a death-knell ring.

The clouds in the sky have turned to black stone.

The dead huddle like outcasts on a moon-paled sunless star.

The good and kind like Carbery who do their best are overwhelmed.

Every night moon skulls, sunken sockets, stick limbs stiffen in death.

The vacuous moon drags the sea night and day like a dog dragging gut.