Lough Swilly

Lough Swilly

Lake of Shadows, shrouded in foundering mist

at Donegal’s glacial blue hour.

Black-faced sheep disappear on heathered Inishowen. A briny wile wind,

barrels in, chops green-grey waves, ripples machair and milkwort.

I lay her on a boulder, oily with black-green weed strewn across cobbled glar

near blanket bogs, slippery and mottled as the backs of seals.

Lake of a thousand peat-dark eyes,

the beginning of forgetting.

Pewter clouds withdraw from iron-bound reefs and shoals

reveal Fanad’s veiled Atlantic fjord. A cormorant lifts jet wings, beckoning.

Nesh, clutching the wee bag, on this final reckoning.

wade towards slow-dancing dulce and oyster beds.

No linen cerements or waxed winding sheet wrap her.

Recall how her last slight breath felt like my first.

I pour mum into silty umbra,

as swan wings whirr and whistle to saltmarsh wetlands.

Beneath screaming gulls

Her dust skims icy estuarine,

sinks to whiting, sharks, porpoise,

ghost ships and lost ingots.

Derelict Swilly Hotel blurs on shore,

where she jettisoned her virginity as a U-boat rose.

Its moonlit-silvered submariners laughing.

I relinquish the mouth music of her meltwater brogue.

Return to the living arms of my husband as the mackerel sky splits,

pelt under smirr-illuminated alder and birch,

gust into a turf-scented Buncrana bar,

order gin and Guinness.

I swear mum nudges the barman’s elbow. We raise a toast in the gloaming,

to last wishes accomplished. Her end is light beginning.