Some may find this poem by John MONTAGUE, born 1929, unsettling, even offensive because of the subject matter - still, I thought that the message was one of acceptance of others through understanding and of the ability of individuals to overcome great wrongs done to them.. Note -- "cailleach" is Irish and Scots Gaelic for "old hag." THE WILD DOG ROSE I go to say goodbye to the Cailleach that terrible figure who haunted my childhood but no longer harsh, a human being merely, hurt by event. The cottage, circled by trees, weathered to admonitory shapes of desolation by the mountain winds, straggles into view. The rank thistles and leathery bracken of untilled fields stretch behind with -- a final outcrop -- the hooped figure by the roadside, its retinue of dogs which give tongue as I approach, with savage, whinging cries so that she slowly turns, a moving nest of shawls and rags, to view, to stare the stranger down. And I feel again that ancient awe, the terror of a child before the great hooked nose, the cheeks dewlapped with dirt, the staring blue of the sunken eyes, the mottled claws clutching a stick but now hold and return her gaze, to greet her, as she greets me, in friendliness. Memories have wrought reconciliation between us, we talk in ease at last, like old friends, lovers almost, sharing secrets. Of neighbours she quarreled with, who now lie in Garvaghey graveyard, beyond all hatred; of my family and hers, how she never married, though a man came asking in her youth. "You would be loath to leave your own' she sighs, "and go among strangers" -- his parish ten miles off. For sixty years since she had lived alone, in one place. Obscurely honoured by such confidences, I idle by the summer roadside, listening, while the monologue falters, continues, rehearsing the small events of her life. The only true madness is loneliness, the monotonous voice in the skull that never stops because never heard. And there where the dog rose shines in the hedge she tells me a story so terrible that I try to push it away, my bones melting. Late at night a drunk came, beating at her door to break it in, the bolt snapping from the soft wood, the thin mongrels rushing to cut, but yelping as he whirls with his farm boots to crush their skulls. In the darkness they wrestle, two creatures crazed with loneliness, the smell of the decaying cottage in his nostrils like a drug, his body heavy on hers, the tasteless trunk of a seventy year old virgin, which he rummages while she battles for life bony fingers reaching desperately to push against his bull neck. "I prayed to the Blessed Virgin herself for help and after a time I broke his grip." He rolls to the floor, snores asleep, while she cowers until dawn and the dogs' whimpering starts him awake, to lurch back across the wet bog. And still the dog rose shines in the hedge. Petals beaten wide by rain, it sways slightly, at the tip of a slender, tangled, arching branch which, with her stick, she gathers into us. "The wild rose is the only rose without thorns," she says, holding a wet blossom for a second, in a hand knotted as the knob of her stick. "Whenever I see it, I remember the Holy Mother of God and all she suffered." Briefly the air is strong with the smell of that weak flower, offering its crumbling yellow cup and pale bleeding lips fading to white at the rim of each bruised and heart- shaped petal. -- John Montague (born 1929)