An Unknown Woman…and Ireland.

(ORIGINAL VERSION..NOW RE WRITTEN) KB OCT 2013
I am an unknown woman.
I live in a land that is hostile to me...
To my kind.

I live in a country swaddled in blankets of dark mendacity.
Tucked up in a cradle of fiction…

It is an Island without snakes…. but bigots can abide.. firm and fat
Lush …Red-face lines are broken rivers .. by the brush of their own foul wind…

He tells of what it is to be a true Gael..
He speaks of Land…but not country.
He speaks of race…
But I am not included….

Malice floats in the air….drifting into delusion….
Conviction is the blood that courses his veins.
He will hear nothing except as he tells it
My existence is denied. He hears nothing …
I am pinned to the perimeters of all that it is to be irish.

His notions are as blighted as the old tree
Standing mournfully in the lost valley
Beneath his swollen belly.
His yellowed teeth have been polished white
But the smile is still the same
The milk that flowed from his mother's breast made it so...
I am an unknown woman…so I let it be.

But his look is furtive and suspicious
To hand is the sharpened Pike ..it is the means of his debate.
His desire is to take all from me…
He casts me into oblivion…into the stench of his slimy slurry pit.

With cunning genuflection
He believes…he believes in his God Given Right…
His paymaster..The Pope of Rome …He kisses the rings..
But he doesn't speak the language.
And I am an unknown woman…so I leave it at that.

His tongue is the tongue of the repetitive mantra..
The setting… staged history … green is the colour
The curtains are drawn open upon crazed visions.. Insane declarations.
And the crowd sighs with relief…the word has been spoken
And from the oracle of the Gael will come the truth.
The myth is enacted …without care
There is no attempt to separate myth from the existence my kind.

I am an unknown woman…
I say nothing.

Kristine Byrne…Aug 2010