The Last Poet

Howth – New Moon of June – 2116

They will come for us soon
The agents of the New Machines

In their watercraft they'll skim across
The drowned suburbs

And I'll leave this note
Though no one might find it

Now that the blindness
Comes with the madness

***

Once upon a time I stood with my grandmother
On these very cliffs – she would murmur

The names – lost streets of the city
In every name the ballast of history

Low dives kips mansions of stone
Raheny Kilbarrack Sutton

Avenues roads crescents parks
Baldoyle Finglas Coolock

Under the blue water
The sunken grave of my mother, her daughter

***

Said grandmother Hannarafe used say
She remembered the days

Of the Old Machines
Training and grooming the children

To service them, to stroke and pet them
Oh yes, she'd say, on the buses, on the trams

The children gazing into the machines,
Whispering to them, feeding them scenes

Of this world and our dreamworld
Downloading our memory hoard

We interinanimated the machines
Even as they digitized our brains

My grandmother Hannarafe would say
Back in the day

***

My own grandchild is, I pray, safe
Radiant! Beauty! named for Hannarafe herself

The pain of the loss of her, apple of my blind eye
With her sharp tongue, her ability to scry

She left last moon with the other children
They slipped solemn and silent

Into the small boats, heading south
Risking all on the word of mouth

News of settlements where they might make a start
In machine-free zones of the human heart

***

They will come for us soon
The agents of the New Machines

To enforce the Edict of New Thought
The New Recalibration Avoidant of Link Rot

The Final Removal of Un-Logic
The Great Re-Gathering of the New Demagogic

The favourite word of the New Regime
The New News and New Reliability Scheme

***

When I was a girl Hannarafe would stand
Here – point across to the Mainland

She'd say Thank fuck
We were safe – stuck

On the Howth side of the water
Over there they were eating each other

What luck, she'd say, to be stranded
Here – the time of the Flood

She'd say, my geomantic grandmother
About the Frantic Days before

The Separation – the bodies – for months
Washing up against the cliffs – the storm fronts

Moving over us – a procession of angry gods.
Those years of the Bad

***

They will come soon
The agents of the New Machines

For the last time I look
Here, in this last book

That has survived the Great Uploading
The Law Against Print designed to bring

Every human utterance through the Filters
Of the New Democratic Holy Scanners

The End of the Road – The End of Memory:
Modernist Irish Poetry of the Early 21st Century

I'd rather burn the evidence
Of my trade, redact to its elements

The ink the paper the board
Smoke on the wind

That drifts at last sovereign and free
The powerful memory of some ancient tree

***

Hannarafe, my grandmother taught me
This old rhyme: Howth for its honey

Its hives, its hawks, its hounds
Its handsome boys, its humdudgeon

And hobthrush, its hasps and hobblers,
Its hylegs, its hyponyms, its hames.

She named herself aboriginal
In a world gone totally institutional

***

They will come soon
The agents of the New Machines

For the girl children, classified Breeders,
For us old ones, designated Upcyclers

The boys for Theocratic Leadership Immersion
Or for Technocratic Service in Data Conversion

I should have been Upcycled at fifty
What they call the New Generosity

I am already too old for that
Now I'll be rendered for my fat

My bones for fertilizer
At the direction of the Agrivizers

***

But they'll not find the children
They're gone with the May moon

Away from the golden gorse blossom
The foaming lace of the May blossom

Over the seven waves
Under the seven stars

This poem is part of the series Dublin in the Coming Times, a free, citywide programme of creative writing run by Fighting Words, in partnership with Dublin Unesco City of Literature. More information at fightingwords.ie