Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin Poem by Sheena Blackhall

High walls and watchtowers loom around the place
This cemetery once needed guards with guns
To keep the dead safe from the body snatchers
Bloodhounds protected Dublin’s buried sons

A graveyard guide leads punters in a party
Telling them tales of bard and patriot
Their stormy lives in Ireland’s chequered history
The dead meanwhile, say nothing, mutely rot

The names trip off his tongue, a martial drumroll
Parnell, Maude Gonne, MacBride, Dan O’Connell
Griffith, De Valera, Casement, Barry,
The Countess Markievicz and Ó Domhnaill

The mass grave of forgotten ‘fallen women’
A Magdalene laundry treated with disdain
Exhumed, cremated, re-interred together
In death, at last they have shrugged off their shame

The Angels’ Plot’s the home of stillborn babies
A place of trees, space for each tiny soul
And the Alone space, free of charge for paupers
For homeless, luckless, drifters on the dole

Glasnevin is James Joyce’s set for Hades
Look in his Ulysses, you’ll find it there
The last address of poets and politicians
Musicians, labourers, priests, a fitting lair

The Visitor Centre downstairs hosts a film show
Enjoy it, but behind you row, on row
Stacked up, from floor to ceiling oaken coffins
Reminders of the way all flesh must go

Acres of Grecian Urns and Celtic crosses
Egyptian obelisks, best coin can buy
Sarcophagi, slate, wood & hardy granite
Cold mausoleum, beneath a weeping sky

See Arthur Griffith’s headstone. It’s unfinished
To stay like that, till all Ireland is one
Séan Foster, caught up in the Easter Rising
The blanket from his pram, his dying gown

In Death is Life, the Tower Café’s busy
Scones, sandwiches and cake. The coffee sold’s
Organic, Fairtrade, Rainforest Alliance
With Irish soda bread, and Kerrygold

The shop tills ching with Druid craft and pottery
Keyrings, magnets, Book of Kells silk wraps
A Sláinte sign. A shamrock patterned tea towel
With posters, pop –up fairies, baseball caps

There’s vouchers for each Season’s floral workshops
There’s flowers in heart shapes, cellophane and sprays
A suite of laptops tapping into archives
Irish diaspora hunt through it, lost strays

What’s so macabre in this great Necropolis?
In Life is Death, it’s where we all go down
Here like a million toppled dominoes
The pieces of the Past, in Dublin town