Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin

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