Fairy Rath

Fairy Rath

Fairy Rath

Here lie the faggoted bones of babies –
stillborn, miscarried, or unbaptised,
returned to the fairies who borrow souls.
They do not mean to hold,
long to test themselves in human traces,
imagine the possibility of blood,
the beating logic of a good heart,
dividing cells, pink fingertips,
the casings of a child’s nails.

But some fear to pass. Drivers
hurry downhill, graze pot-holes in the rush,
avoid small voices
at the shelf-edge of hearing.
Walkers scuttle, call dogs to heel.
Yet I hear no dark whisper,
have sat within view of the rath
on an April Monday,
when the estral celebration is at an end,
near the beech whose roots feed off the wets,
below circling daffodils,
what some believe are rotten.
Bluebells toss in tides, the big field groans
and cracks to life around the rath,
pushing the load of young barley.

I could be stocked, mocked for the shame
of superstition. I hear what I hear,
know what I know: voices behind birdsong,
ticking wings the underside of leaves,
the quick buzz as they set out,
humming to those who’ve passed
and go no further. They bear them back
to this safe place, unthieved, borrowed.
Within the circle, all is wholesome:
the sentried rath, soil stitched with bone
fine as porcelain. Old gods lean in close.