for Rosita Boland
A buzzard over Ballyowen when I set out from Dualla
to Derrynaflan during lockdown and stravaging the roads
like an emissary monk intent from Cashel.
Beyond Ballinure a sense of the west widening, apparition
of stone walls and good land lowering to bad, a bog basin
stretched to eternity. After cavernous wet lanes, a Mohican
causeway over black peat led to a contour of green,
an island rising to a ruinous church and from there forty years ago,
the unimagined hidden hoard, struck. The bounty hoisted
up into the blue after a millennium of darkness, I turn
for home and only notice now, linnets loud in the living hedges,
larks soaring and how hares have taken the roads as their own.
Joseph Woods's most recent collection is Monsoon Diary (Dedalus Press)
