An dreoilín

Dear Sebastian,
I keep returning to the image of the bog in your poem — “years packed down like turf in a bog.” There’s something unsettling and beautiful in it at the same time: time not as something that disappears, but as something that accumulates, layer upon layer, compressed into darkness. It doesn’t feel dead so much as deeply stored, like a kind of geological memory.
Against that density, the “live ember nesting — small as a wren’s heart” feels almost impossibly delicate. As if, inside all that weight of time and silence, there is still a tiny, stubborn concentration of warmth that refuses to go out completely.
The shift in the poem, when “the old earth” loosens just enough for “one green thing,” feels very quiet — not a transformation in a dramatic sense, but more like a slight yielding, a small permission for life to reappear.
And then the ending in Irish — “Agus an dreoilín ag canadh …” — opens everything again rather than closing it. It feels ongoing, like something small and alive continuing to sound underneath everything that has been compressed or held back.
I also found myself wondering about the title and the use of Irish here. What drew you to “dreoilín,” and to Gaelic specifically? Is there a connection to Ireland, or to something in that cultural or linguistic space that informed the poem?
It’s one of those poems that doesn’t resolve into a single reading, but keeps shifting slightly each time you come back to it. Go leanfaidh an dreoilín ag canadh.
Regards,
Rolph