On Hearing Michael Hartnett Read His Poetry in Irish

On Hearing Michael Hartnett Read His Poetry in Irish

On Hearing Michael Hartnett Read His Poetry in Irish

First, the irretrievable arrow of the military road
Drawing a line across all that has gone before
Its language a handful of brutal monosyllables.

By the side of the road the buildings eased up;
The sturdy syntax of castle and barracks,
The rococo flourish of a stately home:

The formal perfection and grace
Of the temples of neoclassical government
The avenues describing an elegant period. Then,

The red-brick constructions of a common coin
To be minted in local stone, and beyond them
The fluent sprawl of the demotic suburbs

Tanged with the ice of its bitter nights
Where I dreamt in the shambles of imperial iambs,
Like rows of shattered Georgian houses.

I hear our history on my tongue,
The music of what has happened!
The shanties that huddled around the manor

The kips that cursed under Christchurch Cathedral
Rising like a madrigal into the Dublin sky
– But tonight, for the first time,

I heard the sound
Of the snow falling through moonlight
Onto the empty fields.