Dreams of a black country infect my sleep
 Ragamuffin babes we cannot keep,
 Everything is black, rotted, gone.
 Everyday I dig down to the bone, 
 To the marrow-black foam on a dead man’s lips 
 black thoughts of the black cancers of the soul.

 No home for me beneath these skeletal trees 
 God isa  black star, in a black mood, afar
 The animals mourn the black earth,
 Conemarra, is cursed, with life and death
 The sky in its vastness, the oceans so deep.
 Our children take their final sleep.

 So many priests murdered by the British
 Nobody to conduct an internment,
 Cruelly beaten, by the land agents
 We crumble into sleep. 
 Dawn on the black mountain freezes my jaw
 hunger pangs throw me into a world of pain
 Birds’ eggs, acorns, germ balls, black beetles. We have eaten them all. 
 We know the British have food 
 Soldiers taunt us with bread. The children cry.

This is a world of famine, of British indifference. 
 Black blood and bad blood work towards a reckoning.
 I dream of guests, of a glaze of sunlight, a congress of colours
 I wake to hunger, children crying with stomach cramps,
 Black inside and out, light paints the levels of dawn,
 Contours of an empty sky set with a slim jet brush of black
 Genocide as imperial policy.