Alcock and Brown
for Joe and Sarah
Under a sky agleam with frosty stars
or with nothing but Atlantic cloud as camouflage
they followed their flight-path,
that real Sky Road between take-off and touch-down.
In Connemara, they appeared like exhausted swimmers
or pilgrims who had come a long way
from beyond the beyond, to Derrygimlagh’s
bare bog stillness, loose ground – not quite terra firma.
No applause, no watching witness, the people gone
to Sunday prayers, when Alcock and Brown
found by luck, by chance, by accident their landing spot –
their Illyria of Irish earth, a landscape with the sound turned off.
In those last years of fading vision
she lived by the sea, hitched to a chair
in front of a vista of inlet and promontory
and off in the distance, the long peninsula –
Cooley and Carlingford,
the Celtic mountain or its misty similitude,
boats leaving the harbour, no sooner seen
than disappearing from her known world.
When she put away her book of folded corners
to look yonder, her eyes, half-blind,
were held in thrall by the pitch and toss
of the quicksilver tides come and gone
like the errand boy who climbed the hill
to her open door where the wind blew in
with a bang that even her deaf ear heard.