Roads to nowhere

This morning, my thoughts meandered over two things:

(1) Yesterday, I breakfasted (late) on hot rhubarb crumble with custard, made a roghan josh at some point in the afternoon, and had a slab of killer chocolate birthday cake for tea. All very scrummy.

(2) It's famine commemoration week.

Skibbereen was chosen as host for what seems to be the first provincial National Famine Memorial Day (Sunday 17th May). It's an appropriate choice: the town was... what's the word I'm looking for... devastated by famine in the 1840s, as attested by the mass graves at nearby Abbeystrewery (which hold somewhere between eight thousand and twelve thousand people).

There are a week of events leading up to the official memorial (music, drama, talks, walks - pdf programme available here).

Anyhoo, so the jolting perspective, thinking back on famine, brought to mind a great poem by Eavan Boland (which I've mentioned another time, in another place):

That the Science of Cartography is Limited

-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.

Eavan Boland