IMMIGRANT DAUGHTER'S SONG All gone, the silver-green silk of time winding down centuries of custom and kinship the pouring of the sea the stars, bright pictures on the slate of night, the moon stamping forever the spire of the church on the sand, bird-song, wind-songs, mother-song Even time itself changed to a ticking, a dot on a line Customs of grace and gentleness gone name-saying and knowing who begat who and when and where and who could work and who could sing and who would pray and who would not and where the fish ran and the wild plums hid and how the old mothers fit their babies' fingers to the five-flowered hollows of blue ladyfingers And whose father fought whose with golden swords a thousand years ago at Ballyferriter on the strand below the church All gone changed from a silken spool unwinding to rooms of relics and loss behind whose locked doors I dream not daring to wake. -- Mary Ann Larkin born 1945 in Pittsburg, PA to Irish-American parents, is a poet and teacher living in Washington, D. C. A book of her poems, 'The Coil of Her Skin, was published in 1982.