Poem for Grace Farrell (1976–2011)
A thin column in the newspaper; she died in an alcoveOutside Saint Brigid's Church. She was from Wicklow.She had been an artist. She came here at age seventeen.She drank. She married a man who slept on the avenue,Not near the church. He didn't like the church and saidThat the church talked to him at night in a stern rumble.He beat her. Her friends on the street beat him and toldHim to stay away from her. Her alcove had a roof on it,In a sense, as there was a construction scaffold above it.The folks like us — nobody knows us until we are dead,Said a friend of hers on the street. Her family in IrelandAccepted her body, from the medical examiner's office.We told them that she was homeless, but they chose notTo believe that, said the examiner. Her name was Grace.So that's the end of the article. But what if that's not theEnd at all? What if the old church spoke to Grace FarrellThat night, held her in its southern arm, sang very gentlyTo her as she died, caught her spirit as it hit the scaffold,And handed it up, weeping for the sweet broken woman?Couldn't that be? Couldn't it be that we don't know whoShe was and wanted to be, and maybe she was a wonder?That could be. Maybe she was what she was invited to be.Maybe her soul said yes to pain in this world to save kidsSomewhere else. Maybe she was brave in ways we neverWill know now. Every time I think I know something forSure I get the gift of not being sure at all; isn't that grace?
Mrs Simmons says
That the question do animals go to heaven is a silly question,And that the reverse is the question to be asked — can peopleEver achieve the blunt holy unselfish nature of other species?She asks this with an artful artlessness as she wraps an order:A meat pie, made from one creature that never killed another,As she says. Though surely the cow mowed the sentient grass.Did you think that the grass was not alert to the lovely world?Surely it was, sensing the sun, sucking water and the mineralsBelow, what there were of them, old Australia, we're a desertWith a scraggy green rim, is what it is. Now when I was a girl,She says, longer ago than you can conceive, I thought we mayBe speeding up evolutionarily, what