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      April 3, 2023Oíche na Gaoithe MóireFrank Dullaghan

      “The Night of the Big Wind”—On the night of 6th January 1839, the worst storm ever reported hit the west coast of Ireland. With winds of up to 130 mph it devastated the country, claiming up to 800 lives, according to some reports.

      How could one account for it, coming as it did
      during the hours of darkness, building itself up
      in the black of night? Rain-sodden, it lashed
       
      the thatched roofs of cabins until they collapsed,
      ripped spires off churches, tumbled walls.
      Cattle froze to death where they stood. Sheep
       
      were bowled off the sides of mountains.
      It roared in from the open Atlantic and travelled
      eastwards, ripped through Dublin, blew boats
       
      from Skerries across the Irish Sea. The like
      had never been seen. It was the start, the
      Seanachaí storytellers said later, shaking their heads.
       
      It was the great leaving. The Sidhe, the Irish fairies,
      who lacking wings, travelled on the back of winds
      they raised, had left Ireland in mighty numbers.
       
      For sure, there were not many of them left when
      that night was over—hay ricks scattered, Hawthorn
      and Rowan whipped to shreds, and the music and
       
      lights that were sometimes witnessed around
      fairy forts, no longer seen. It was a catastrophe.
      Less than a decade later, a blight would come
       
      on the potato crop, and famine would send
      families into the west in coffin ships, crossing
      the same ocean that had held that Gaoithe Móire
       
      in its maw, continuing the Sidhe’s great leaving.
      The land lifted from the water, the Seanachaí said,
      with the weight of so many gone.

      from #79 - Irish Poets

      Frank Dullaghan

      “The big thing I learned from Kavanagh was the power of an image. I remember his famous poem ‘In Memory of My Mother.’ His mother’s buried in a churchyard in Monaghan, but he sees her on a market day walking through the town, and he remembers her as they’re stacking up the ‘ricks of hay against the moonlight.’ I remember that image, and I could see it when I first read it; it was like a lightning bolt. I don’t know why certain images hit us, but that image—I could see it. There was no great thing happening here; it was just those simple words, and yet they had the power to create this picture in my head. I remember thinking, ‘I need to be able to do that, get these images, find simple words to capture something and put it down.’”

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