Dánta na hÉireann  (poems composed in Irish)

Posted by K E Dennis
on:    15 January 1999

Oddly enough, this poem by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill addresses the conjunction between these two things.

People who live deep w/in the agricultural world don't tend to have utterly light-hearted beliefs about natural - or supernatural - forces. They must face brutal weather - like the recent storm in the West - as well as glorying in the soft mornings & the rainbows. They experience directly the unpredictability of climate: as when the ISPCA recently announced there was a national shortfall in fodder (due to the very cool summer, IIRC) & expressed concern that many farm animals might become sick, or starve, if farmers couldn't afford to buy sufficient supplemental feed.

There is disease & death in the world - not just the safe birth of healthy children; there are accidents & disasters as well as good harvests & satisfied loves; there are storms that tear the roofs off houses & swallow up boats at sea. The otherwise apparently inanimate world seems alive, & powerful, both malevolent & beneficent. This is what lies at the root of animism, the most common form human spirituality takes worldwide.

Sometimes those forces come to be thought of as the work of An Other Folk such as the sidhe - the beginnings of paganism & of theism. Often, such beings are shape-shifters & tricksters, unpredictable & capricious, potentially protective, just as easily a grave danger. Always, a grim shadow flickers in the wake of the bright images.

They steal the healthy child from the cradle, & leave behind their own distorted offspring. They help the cream turn to butter - or dry up the cow herself, so that your own little ones have no milk in their cups, no butter for their bread or cheese for their supper. They reveal a horde of gold torcs & ancient coins to a youngster casually poking about in the earth - & entice an unwary traveller into the depths of a fog-bound bog.

They loom, menacing, out of that particularly unearthly darkness that seems to gather between the standing stones, at the portal of the ancient cairn... or bound out of that same darkness as a friendly hound, leading you straight to the distant light of a welcoming hearth.

They make the hair rise up on your neck, & your heart pound, for no reason, as you walk home in the hush of a winter night...

& they have been blamed many times over, too, for those things people do that we prefer to call 'inhuman' & 'unnatural.'