It’s raining.
It seems mud and rain is de rigeur in this world.
She keeps this phrase to herself.
Underdressed, she shifts, stamps feet,
pulls colourful summer scarves around her arms.
Not far from here, the Shannon cough
rolls in from the river.
There is raucous cheering
and words fall through the air
like touch and try and scrum.
She thinks she can pick out her son
amongst the throng of nearly men
but loses him as they fall,
then rise and fall again.
She’s drifting off, floating through other worlds –
Midas’s wife, Heaney, honeyed tongues.
Cleopatra stands on the horizon.
An asp, at her ear, whispers false words of love.
And then, from the far side of the chalky lines,
she hears his voice –
plaintive, deep –
shouting out across flat fields
towards the hills of Clare and Tipperary,
Everybody has someone.
and echoing down the lanes of Limerick,
Everybody has someone.
Everybody has someone.
