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