Silent Valleys.
By Randall Stephen Hall ©
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Over the years I’ve become more aware of the events in Ireland prior to the
Plantation of Ulster. As you delve into the bog of history you cannot help but ask yourself questions. Questions that you then want to ask out loud. This now comes in the form of a poem regarding Hugh O’Neill’s early relationship with England and the court of Queen Elizabeth the 1st.. How he learned to move and live in two worlds. Two deep currents pulling and tugging at him until eventually he was torn apart.
His one discrete need
Was to bleed for his tribe.
To hide himself away from childhood
Between two eyes with measured difference.
Between two minds
And two circumstances.
Lodged amongst two cultures.
Between the devil
And the manifestation of the devil
In human form, now walking amongst his people.
Foreign devils striding across the deep blue sea.
Foreign devils he understood, who he knew well.
“Adventurers” seems, to me, like a fraudulent term
For men who rape your country.
Whose names now ornament the streets of Belfast.
Scorched earth, burnt crops, roped stock
And the disappearance of most of your flock
Leaves its mark between your two eyes.
Between two minds, between two languages
And a broken promise to a virgin queen.
The silence in the valleys and the glens.
The hollow silence in the hen houses and the cradles.
Bodies, many bodies, hidden away in dark places.
Erased memories, cultured on a petrie dish of forgetfulness.
Blood orange blooms cluster upon this fragile glass
Stored on shelves, in fusty cupboards
Where the light of day can barely reach the deeds
And legal papers exchanged for a living crop.
Where vellum and ink rot, like ripe fruit
As if this could ever be legitimate.
Promises torched and turned to an unending carbon fuel.
A brutalised growth ripped up from a moist soil.
Our memory recoils as the bullet of forgotten stories
Sinks into the ground and rusts like the lost sword
Of some armed adventurer, conquistador, explorer.
A whore to the sword, to war and the highest bidder.
Still horrific and silhouetted against the flames of destruction.
Bloody disfunctional son.
Harvesting the nests of others who do not suit your needs.
The greed of a few, bring down the need of the many
In just a few scorched months, in Ulster.
The resulting famine devastes and breaks
Further resistance.
No imbedded news hounds to witness these events.
No women reporters holding microphomes like lamplight
To inform the darkness of these huts
Without windows, or doors to life.
Where is my wife, my children?
Where is my father, my mother?
Where will I discover them, and in which field?
In which mound will I scratch for their remains?
Will archaeology ever discover the twisted cart and barrel
Of all these lives, these wives children and wayward screams
Still haunting our ignorant senses.
For no one has informed us of our own history
Clearly or adequately.
Our history waits on the sidelines
For a late substitution.
Stretching and warming up.
Yet without the knowledge or beacon
Upon which to reflect, our peace cannot flourish.
For what if the same energy used to find
Just one of the present disappeared was pressed
Into the search for a population brought close
To complete elimination.
What then?
What pain would be released through this?
A marker to this horribly adventurous deed.
All for the sake of an adventurers greed.
Building himself up from soldier, to deputy
To king, in all but name
Amongst the narrow cobbled streets of Belfast.
Diplomat and killer between two eyes.
Two eyes, set apart, for they could never ever be
The eyes of a savage Irish man.
Surely not?
For these killings were civilized and sanctioned.
Condoned and ratified with gratitudes and gifts.
Each working, hand in hand.
Two hands upon Ulster.
The land, in which still contains the secrets
Of the many, many, many disappeared.
Gone, up in a puff of smoke.
A conjuring trick, never explained to the public.
Like dead wild pigs
Consumed in a dark oak wood smoke.
That would almost choke the life
Out of this place.
But the Irish savage, corked and kin sailed.
Cut through like rock and deeply etched.
By a waterfall of demands and deeds.
Bleeds still, for his tribe.
These silent valleys.
Motionless and hidden by our natural beauty.
Still available to the digger or anyone with the interest.
Lying in wait, lies a creviced lock, in the ground
Waiting for the right key.
For one big question, waiting to be asked.
Our past and our future, waiting to be re-calibrated.
This old hatred, set free, through a voice, heard.
Who will ask the question?
A politician, a villain, a child, the dogs in the street?
Who will be wild enough to blow up a storm
Rather than a building?
Childish enough to open their mouths
And ask . . . what happened here?
What happened to the beginning of our past?
Who will prize up the rotten supports
Beneath the wooden boards of our present.
Who will cleanse our foundations
And rid our community of its silent state?
Where we all wait for someone else to speak first
And turn the other cheek.
Mothers, fathers and children, drilled, like pea pods
Into the ground of Ulster, its very core and soul.
Red hands and yellow skin
Waiting still, for the winnowing.
For when will they be heard and accounted for?
Their graves marked, like those of the two world wars?
Not for another monument I ask
To O’Neil and his wild geese, these Gaelic lords
But for the harvested crop, his tribe, long forgotten.
So set upon by loathsome adventurers.
What monument will we ever set up to them?
Where will it be and how big?
What will it cost
To fully account for all their troubles
And lives lost?
Buried in the foundations of the plantation.
A strange crop, dug back into the ground of a nation.
So torn apart by our mixed seed.
So when and where will this be?
To break the spell, still foaming in the dog’s mouth
At Tullyhogue?
Will we do this?
Or will our children have to do it for us
Once more?
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