Woman of the Sidhe

When you were younger
you seemed to care less
about being despised.

Men with porridge faces
damned the Land League
left tenants in ditches,
said, Let them die
These people must be taught
a lesson and you rose
from their tables, ordered
your carriage, turned
your back on the country house,
the huntball, the landlord’s wife.

They hated you for your choice
not to be one of them.

Sir John in Donegal dangled
wife like a diamond pendant
before you, wife of a liberal MP.
All afternoon, battering rams
at the doors of those cabins,
an old woman carried out
on a mattress, clutching a rosary,
another too weak to stand,
her day-old infant on the ground.
When he gave you the diamond
on its gold chain, you put it
in the hands of the farmer’s wife,
rent for the year and more.

Woman of the Sidhe the poor called you:
Soup Kitchens. Letters to the Press.
Arriving with your canaries and finches,
your Great Dane, Dagda, his paws in leather boots,
you wanted to shelter everything fragile and torn.
New cottages for the countryside.
Cakes and porter and fiddlers to warm them.

But alone in each cramped hotel room
sleeping upright to breathe,
you hid from them all
the grey lady in your dreams:
Murderess of children she called
you, showed you the face
of your dead son.

Kathryn Kirkpatrick