Blood Fetters - History Erased. Poem by Geraldine Moorkens Byrne

I have a sister
in the shadows
- she is the spider in the corner.
I have a sister
whose blood fetters me,
ties me unwilling to her madness
her lies;
her house of shames and half-perceived
sleights of hand.
She has now re-written the past,
family history
twisted
through the kaleidoscope
of her madness.
We have acquired Jewish ancestry.
The kindly Jewess neighbour of our childhood
transmogrified
without her permission
into some distant,
holocaustic
relative.
My own Jewish friends
Offended
beyond words - bad enough she
hawks their collective pain
to produce some born again credentials.
Essentially,
she is a creeping
death.
Poison pen wielded in
self aggrandizement
doggerel offered
as a palliative to gentile minds
untroubled
by depth of understanding.
Our childhood reissued in gothic form
complete with a new province,
new vitae
in a new milieu,
part of our nation's conflict,
born in semtex
and raised by armalite;
inexplicable captions from events
grisly remains
behind golden altars
insulting the old
and the new, the very
marrow of our heritage
prostituted.
I read in disbelief,
fragments
that yield her delusions
read and disbelieve
and fear.
The truth is
a distant country
divorced from her now.
She has denied us
foresworn us
betrayed us.
We are the Tuatha and
she is now
Foreign.
My life has rooted
flowered in the essence
of my reality.
hers is withering on
a dead tree
hanging.