Free A Man in a Distant Field by Theresa Kishkan

language that ever was created, the language of the ancient Celtic people who lived in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and some in France and Cornwall, too. Let me think what I can say to you in it so ye’ll get an idea of its music. Well, yes, here’s a bit of poetry.
    A bennáin a búiredáin
,
a béicedáin binn
,
is binn linn in cúicherán

do-ní tú ‘sin glinn
.
Éolchaire mo mennatáin

do-rala ar mo chéill—

na lois isin machaire
,
na h-ois isin t-sléib ...”
    He paused.“Do you ye like the sound of it then?”
    â€œOh, it’s lovely! Like music, or water. What does it mean?” Rose’s face was radiant, and she clasped her hands in front of her in delight. A girl in a shabby dress, her hair braided in two untidy ropes, green eyes alive with the poetry.
    Declan thought for a minute, wanting to give her equal joy in an English version. “It means something like this, Rose. I will try to make it poetry as well. It’s from a long poem about a sort of hermit, living on his own after being a prince of Ulster and going mad in battle:
    Little antlered one, little belling one,
melodious little bleater,
sweet I think the lowing
that you make in the glen.”
    He stopped. “So that’s the first bit, Rose, about a deer or a young stag, I guess. And this is what follows:
    Homesickness for my little dwelling
has come upon my mind,
the calves in the plain,
the deer on the moor ...”
    Rose exclaimed again and clapped her hands. Declan had seen this in the past, when a girl from a mountain farm, with knowledge of sheep and turf cutting, would hear, in poetry, a chord that struck deep within her heart. He wished it could become more for them than a momentary fragment of joy in the classroom. The future held little poetry for these girls. Marriages would be arranged for some, others would enter service in a country house, some would work in the wool industryin Leenane, carding or spinning or weaving, and most would lose their bloom early with the harsh conditions that awaited them. One young woman in the nearby village had disgraced herself and her family by consorting with an English soldier and had been publicly stripped, her hair shorn, tar roughly painted onto her young body, and the feathers of geese and ducks shaken over her. Declan had known her father and knew the shame that he felt when the young woman left for England and word came back that she was carrying the child of the soldier. He hadn’t heard whether the man took her in or not. He felt such pity for the girl and wished there had been something he could have done besides making his opinion known, in the quiet way he was known for, as he had always done. Sometimes love did not strike in a seemly or proper way—having taught school for years made him alert to the sighs of a boy yearning for a strapping lass twice his size or to the sight of a shadow against a stone wall splitting in two as his presence parted an embrace between a mountain girl, shoeless and clad in homespun, and a lad from a village family.
    â€œHave ye heard of the Famine, Rose, the potato famine in Ireland? My parents called it the Black Hunger.” Declan led the way back to the cabin, carrying a covered dish holding cheese.
    She hadn’t, and so he told something of it, how a terrible blight had killed the potato plants overnight, and overnight, seventy-five years ago, life had changed for the Irish forever. Most people depended utterly upon the potato for daily life; a few, like his father’s family, also grew modest crops and animals for market and didn’t fare quite so badly, but they, with their small amount of cash, were the exception. The populations of entire townlands disappeared, villages emptied of their occupants. Those who could fled for America, assisted in some cases by the Crown or by landlords who wanted them off the land, their rents so far in arrears that the landlords pleaded