The Song of the Books (Amhr án na Leabhar)

for Seamus and Bronagh

It’s the plummeting second note that knells his despair two centuries later – his clothes and all his leather-bound books drifted down among the kelp off Derrynane – his own poems, his rare manuscripts in Irish, blurring underwater, turning to pulp among crabs and mackerel and the poet-schoolmaster, who had travelled overland, getting word by the shore in Port McGee, and making a song out of utter loss. It was not the library of Alexandria whose shelved scrolls stored the known world’s wisdom and claimed to cure souls, or the library of Nineveh or of Babylon, where kings had imprinted their triumphs on wet clay,

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