The Dream

Come away, O human child

To the waters and the wild,

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world's more full of weeping

than you can understand.

from The Stolen Child by W.B. Yeats

The mountains - Ballyhoura - their name

a long drawn out moaning of the wind

as it slips into her hunger

and the dream begins again,

carries her to where the sea grieves

and its losses are piled

against the harbour wall - Cobh.

And by the voice in the dream and the wind's cry

she is beguiled:

Come away, O human child.

Her heart turns over in reply.

Her "yes" is a whisper, a sigh

escaping from half-closed lips

to rest on the midnight air.

"Yes>" The word has taken shape --

one word, deceptively mild,

but it carries her off with its sound of the sea

as "yes" she breathes, and "yes" again,

and the waves take this forgotten child

to the waters and the wild.

The waters rise inside her head,

flow over onto her cheeks.

Máire ni Bhríain is aim dom,

Máire ní Bhrían her name again.

But only the wind can hear her cry,

the wind and a haunted lane,

and all she wants is the dream to endure,

moon and stars to light her way

to run and dance in sea and sand

with a faery, hand in hand.

The magic breaks with morning mist.

Dream dissolves in ghostly light,

and back, she slips

into the familiar gnaw of huger.

Máire, Máire, her mother's name,

a soft remembrance claimed by the land,

as she repeats the lesson learned by rote:

there can only be forgetting

of all the things we've planned,

for the world's more full of weeping

than you can understand.