Morning does not break—
it slowly seeps.
Out of peat-dark earth
and rain-burnished stone,
the mist rises slow as memory
from the breathing bogs of Éire.
It curls through low stone walls,
those patient ribs of field and time,
laid by hands that knew
the truth of hunger and wind.
Heather bends in quiet assent.
Gorse holds a hidden gold.
Far off, a lone sheep calls—
a thin white note
threaded through the gray.
This is a land that remembers in layers.
Each hill a held story,
each hollow a listening bowl
where old voices settle
like ash after a long telling.
The mist knows all their names.
It moves like a seanchaí—
soft-voiced, unhurried—
carrying fragments of myth
between the standing runes.
Here a whisper of the Tuatha Dé Danann,
there the fading footfall
of the Sidhe
passing just beyond sight.
Nothing ever declares itself.
Even the sea—
that old Atlantic pulse—
arrives only as breath,
salted and ancient,
pressing gently inland
through the veils of air.
I walk a boreen barely there,
grass closing softly behind me,
as though the land prefers
no lasting mark.
My steps feel borrowed.
The mist thickens—
a woolen hush
wrapped round the shoulders of the day.
And somewhere, faint as ancestry,
a fiddle might be playing
or perhaps only the wind
drawing its long bow
across the wires of the world.
Time loosens itself here.
It becomes less a road
and more a circling—
a return without arrival.
Even my thoughts
begin to quiet,
their edges worn smooth
like stones in a patient stream.
Until I, too,
am only a passing presence
in this older remembering—
my breath joining the mist,
my outline thinning
into the soft-spoken air—
and I cannot tell
if I am walking through Ireland,
or if Ireland—
ancient, listening, unforgotten—
is walking
through me.
Beautifully penned, S. This was a lovely write my friend. Appreciate you.
Damian
hello lovely poetess my brother in law owns property in Ireland his mother is from there they go often I myself have not been there but reading your poem I can feel the breath of the land and mist ❤️ beautiful
Well this is a wonderfully refreshing read. I really dig the details that you sprinkled in, here and there, to give it authenticity.
It’s like a bit of education for the reader, but in an entertaining format that keeps them enthralled.
Well done, lass!
Hauntingly beautiful and filled with the exquisite talent you have with language. The permutations flowed through me as I read like an Irish mist across the heather filling me with the wonder of your walk through that ancient land.
John