& mostly of one morning, walking out to Kilcruttin to stand above the unmarked grave of some 2,000 dead of the Great Hunger, having just finished reading the local accounts & Tullamore workhouse records. Not yet the park it is now (with a modest plaque that speaks of those dead), it was a quiet place, with only the small walled burial ground that had served the garrison. A peaceful field where cows were pastured & the ground was boggy, & there were nettles & wildflowers, & no one keening.

That the Science of Cartography is Limited Eavan Boland

Eavan Boland: Collected Poems Manchester:  Carcanet Press, Ltd., 1995

- and not simply by the fact that this shading of
forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam,
the gloom of cypresses
is what I wish to prove.

When you and I were first in love we drove
to the borders of Connacht
and entered a wood there.

Look down you said: this was once a famine road.

I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass
rough-cast stone had
disappeared into as you told me
in the second winter of their ordeal, in

1847, when the crop had failed twice,
Relief Committees gave
the starving Irish such roads to build.

Where they died, there the road ended

and ends still and when I take down
the map of this island, it is never so
I can say here is
the masterful, the apt rendering of

the spherical as flat, nor
an ingenious design which persuades a curve
into a plane,
but to tell myself again that

the line which says woodland and cries hunger
and gives out among sweet pine and cypress,
and finds no horizon

will not be there.