Richard Krawiec
Famine Roads
Night pushes away the day.
Even still, they continue
to angle their shovels
into the mucky sod. Sparks
flare when their blades strike
granite. Their chins hang down,
mouths fallen open as if to filter
life from air. In the congregation
of dark, the stars go unnoticed.
So the English dealt with famine,
forcing bodies into ketosis, forcing
the Irish to raven their own cells;
hair and nails grow brittle,
organs fill with toxins, hearts wither
to faulty pumps; like love twisted
from joy to doubt, feeding on itself.
And so, too, my dear, we scrape forward,
lift our spades, plunge exhausted
towards a ground we can only hope
to judder against, just as we ask
the brittle bones of our feet, gauzed
in cracked skin, to deliver us,
to finish this road, pray it doesn’t
go nowhere.
NOTE: During the Potato Famine the British, under the 1847 Labour Rate Act, would force starving Irish peasants to build roads that legally could not go anywhere.