POETRY

On Driving in Medieval Towns

I live in a town built for horses.
I swear under my breath, swinging my car around 
corners meant for smaller, slower beasts. 
I press the accelerator, passing under stone arches
crossing the bridge this town was named for. 
A name evolving across time, 
moving from one language into another,
passing down and down. 
The river ford. The place of kings. 
Home.

These walls have stood for eight hundred years. 
I pay them no mind, snuggling my car in beside them. 
Aldi’s lights push back the growing dusk.
This shop was built with its back against
the most well-preserved town wall in Europe.
I wander the bright aisles, filling my basket.

The dinner I cook will be different,
frozen pizza as opposed to potatoes, but still.
I will return from town with the messages
the way my mother does
the way my grandmother does
the way generations of my family did 
back across lost centuries.

Three-quarters of a millennium later
and the castle still stands. 
I saw a puppet show in that whitewashed basement
fireworks bursting from the castle’s shadow, 
a projector’s beams splitting the night.
Light, always, on that ancient stone.
Here is the fulcrum around which
our jagged town turns.

Grey stone town, buried in the wilds
off the M50 motorway. No thriving metropolis
no busy town centre, hardly anything here at all.
But there are ties that hold me in this place,
ties that I will never shake free of.
Stone keeps out the cold, keeps out the wind, 
keeps out the wolves.
This town holds me in cupped hands. 
I will grow old here, in the quiet.

I reverse my car out, keeping watch all around,
and I take the long way home.
On a clear blue day 
the clouds drift over the Priory’s open roof. 
A tower once grew from this building’s back wall. 
The great window still holds a ghost of itself.
There was more here, once. 

Cromwell burnt the Priory. 
A great centre of learning, 
and he razed it to the ground. 
The ruins are standing, still. 
The Priory will never be a university again.
But there are six schools in this little town. 
On a clear blue day, primary school children 
run among the Priory’s grasses
while their teachers tell them, in frustrated voices
about the choice of hell or Connacht. 

The town survived, is what I mean to say.
Our town grew around the darkness,
learned to hold it. 
When I think I am falling behind,
When I feel I am not moving fast enough,
I am reminded that there is a certain victory
in merely surviving. That a safe home 
is nothing to cast aside.
That even a small and quiet life
lingers on, centuries beyond itself.