Wednesday, September 19, 2012


Dublin Castle

An image blurring in its menacing secrecy
Cold stone, dripping fresh rain from above - the castle’s sky
With every wash, more filth surfaces.
Rising in this place, as the ascendency.

For, I have always seen it, through the black and white
Of a past page, two words written with a trembling clasp;
Under, the castle is deluged. Deluged with ‘traitors’.
Men who were made to wear the devil’s mask.

Mocked for the wrongs, they thought rights.
Two colours appear different in diverging eyes
The castle. Dublin. Ireland. Éire. A Kingdom of…
Servants, sinners, stones and our helpful spies.

A place of high standing - It touches the sky.
Not piercingly, but as a plague, an infection.
A knife is easily removed, and replaced.
But it seeps, and all are under our subjection

It owns the sky; sky around it, around this island.
Overcast, stalking closer to those people there.
Storms and tumults to evict their warmth
Rains, winds; a bittering, biting, breaking air.

Torture’s echoes captured in this courtyard
Do chill each footfall that is caste
With the chocked last words of scandal
From martyrs now at last de-masked.

~ Garbhán Ó Ruis
19/9/12

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