NEAR BALLYCONNEELY, CO. GALWAY I A stony stretch. Grey boulders Half-buried in furze and heather, Purple and gold -- Connemara's Old bones dressed in colours Out of a royal past. Inshore the sea is marbeled And veined with foam. The Twelve Pins Like thunderclouds hewn from rock Or gods in a cloudy fable Loom through the overcast. The roofless dwellings have grown Back to the earth they were raised from, And tune with those primordial Outcrops of grey stone Among the furze and the heather. Where man is dispossessed Silence fills up his place Fast as a racing tide. Little survivors of our West But stone and the moody weather. II Taciturn rocks, the whisht of the Atlantic The sea-thrift mute above the corpse-white strand Pray silence for those vanished generations Who toiled on a hard sea, a harsher land. Not all the bards harping on ancient wrong Were half as eloquent as the silence here Which amplifies the ghostly lamentations And draws a hundred-year-old footfall near. Preyed on by gombeen men, expropriated By absentee landlords, driven overseas Or to mass-burial pits in the great famines, They left a waste which tourists may call peace. The living plod to Mass, or gather seaweed For pigmy fields hacked out from heath and furze -- No eye to spare for the charmed tourist's view, No ear to heed the plaint of ancestors. Winds have rubbed salt into the ruinous homes Where turf-fires glowed once: waves and seagulls keen Those mortal wounds. The landscape's an heroic Skeleton time's beaked agents have picked clean. -- Cecil Day-Lewis