Whiskers in the Chamber

I am not one but many

dust

fungus

alga

salt

and breath

a woven linen coat with no closure
a crooked bond no storm can uproot

dúirt bean liom go ndúirt bean léi
a woman told me that a woman told her —
stories never written on paper
stories carried mouth to mouth
and who decides what makes a story true?

our threads are older than ireland
older than any conquest
older than any borders
older than the stone houses braced against the wind

seamus says: we are bombarded by the empty air
‍but we know the air is never empty
it carries lives, whispers, grief —
the soiled breath of sickness and cure

we read it like braille across our skin
to you it is ‘a huge nothing’; to us it is archive

we grow where trees are sick
we taste polluted air in the weakened wind
ash branches silvered like a grandmother’s hair

we do not cure — we companion
our crip bodies absorb
wounds the way limestone drinks rain
illness is not ending, it is an oracle

we are not one but many

shell

ink

tears

tooth

bile

sieve

and witness

decline and survival share the same root system

step into the senate chamber at stormont:
irish linen dyed pink, australian walnut benches,
a speaker’s chair hewn from south african wood

colonial botany and empire’s mahogany parade
as ornament

the elk and the lion stare down from botticino marble
guardians of a crumbling unity
here, even air is adversarial
strafing invisibly between divided walls

yet we are here too
in fissures and damp corners
we soften stone, weather time
feed the soil and come from the compost
with our slow retting

eco-crip time is not state time
it is not the good friday clock, nor quarterly reports

it is earth time, lichen time:
a refusal of speed
a refusal of temporal cure
a stubborn insistence on survival
through entanglement

we know that solidarity must be porous
let us circulate, die down in the season
but come back
when trees are older and sun is rare

no body is an island
no parliament stands alone
we are a network of care and of contamination

millions of witches’ whiskers

reading the air
prophesying the storm
laying the shield for inflammation
better than penicillin

lichen people know
how to partner with algae, how two or three together
thrive where neither could alone
we taste, listen and soothsay —

we write no treaty, we weave no flag
only a breathing manuscript on stone
call us common weed
soft and unkillable

we do not end, we weather
we do not conquer, we cling

we answer in lichened tongues
that every wound is also a seam
every crack

a place for kinship to root