With Paddy Sherry at Sliabh Beagh
May I touch the bog moss? I ask, and he nods.
So I kneel—having come far for this.
How can I say why to this stranger
I’ve hired to drive me to uplands
blanketed by bell heather and peat?
I hardly understand myself.
Doubled over as I’ve been by grief
I find the starry red moss, then another
with pink crowns. Some tasseled green
and damp, almost wet.
I close my eyes and move my hands
over the braille of clustered branches
that grow just a meter in a thousand years,
as threatened by turf cutters
as ground-nesting birds are by badgers.
The grouse that lays her eggs in the heather,
pipits, too. Everything is endangered, Paddy says
without saying it. Then, as if he had: So it is.
When I look up I see as far as three counties:
two in the north, another in the Republic
through which badgers and pine martens roam,
ignoring borders. The large heath
and peacock butterflies seek nectar
everywhere heather dyes the land purple,
where bog grows up the slopes,
holds onto the hills. Earth and water,
the living moss meets what’s died down under.
So absorbent, the tender plants
are used to dress wounds.
A temporary fix, what beauty is.
This. The free fall of the hen harrier,
spinning, somersaulting from above.
The meadow pipit that rises straight up,
and the skylark flying higher still.
Every pretty thing.
Even the unseen I hear singing.
Allison Funk is the author of six books of poetry, including, most recently The Visible Woman (Parlor Press, 2021). In 2022 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, and The Best American Poetry, among other publications.
Header photo by Bo Scheeringa Photography, courtesy Shutterstock.
