AS HIBERNIA FEASTS
Text
Geez Magazine //
Issue 68: Bread and Wine
Spring 2023.
Geez Magazine //
Issue 68: Bread and Wine
Spring 2023.
In exchange for thirty-some hours of
farm work, a few of us strangers receive room, board, and the company of one
another in the small village of Ardmayle, Ireland. We’re three women spending a
month as students to the farm.
Today we’re joking about sex while planting lettuce in the farthest polytunnel from the house. Anna detangles each stem from the planter before I poked the baby out by its roots. Anna and I can hardly tell one variety from another. After planting hundreds of seedlings in rows of five, we learn that these leaves will be bushes by spring.
This day is like yesterday and will be like tomorrow. Some mornings we hum Gwen Stefani songs while we fill 150g bags of kale. Other mornings, we trade soft silences over breakfast. When the light lowers and we can’t tell our hands from the dirt, we lock up the packing room and carry the day’s leftovers up to our kitchen.
We chop the parsley and spinach into a pesto. Boil potatoes for gnocchi. Take what’s left – anything leafy that won’t last – and we’ll toss it in oil, vinegar, and salt. Save the peppers to stew tomorrow and we can roast the squash on Sunday. It’s the farmhand’s challenge: find a way to eat everything that can’t be sold. Or, how can we eat our way through Ireland without ever having to leave Ardmayle?
But we buy our milk and cheese in town, and learn how smooth butter should be. Down in County Wicklow where poet Breda Wall Ryan grew up, as she writes in “Village I,’ “You learned so well you can milk with one hand,/ cheek pressed to the cow’s warm flank.”
The more I read the poetry of women who have farmed Ireland past, the more clearly I see that there is nothing about this land that hasn’t been known before.
“Don’t cut off rhubarb stalks with a knife,/just twist them clean from the crown, wrote Jane Clarke (in “Her Own”).
And while a hammer calls out the rhythm of the only man for acres, it is just a mess of bootprints by the shed that marks the work of us women. Together we gather enough vegetables to fill the van for the Dublin market. We feast like kings. But when the hammer quiets, the early night shadows any record of our efforts.
While Irish women have sown the seeds and warmed the ovens in this Catholic, profoundly green country, they have also been telling stories. They spoke their words long before they were ever etched on paper. Then came the printing press, and a world of readers who wanted to know this craft of Ireland for themselves.
And now this country has no shortage of authors, generations of women among them.
From 2008 to 2021, poet Chris Murray built Poethead, a database of hundreds of contemporary Irish women poets and their work. Mothers, daughters, workers, farmers, and thinkers. They see the world and dare to answer for it.
The mam on the farm tells me it’s one of the warmest Novembers this country’s ever seen. And as Moya Cannon writes in “Bread,” and the old alchemy of water,/flour and leaven has begun.
Today we’re joking about sex while planting lettuce in the farthest polytunnel from the house. Anna detangles each stem from the planter before I poked the baby out by its roots. Anna and I can hardly tell one variety from another. After planting hundreds of seedlings in rows of five, we learn that these leaves will be bushes by spring.
This day is like yesterday and will be like tomorrow. Some mornings we hum Gwen Stefani songs while we fill 150g bags of kale. Other mornings, we trade soft silences over breakfast. When the light lowers and we can’t tell our hands from the dirt, we lock up the packing room and carry the day’s leftovers up to our kitchen.
We chop the parsley and spinach into a pesto. Boil potatoes for gnocchi. Take what’s left – anything leafy that won’t last – and we’ll toss it in oil, vinegar, and salt. Save the peppers to stew tomorrow and we can roast the squash on Sunday. It’s the farmhand’s challenge: find a way to eat everything that can’t be sold. Or, how can we eat our way through Ireland without ever having to leave Ardmayle?
But we buy our milk and cheese in town, and learn how smooth butter should be. Down in County Wicklow where poet Breda Wall Ryan grew up, as she writes in “Village I,’ “You learned so well you can milk with one hand,/ cheek pressed to the cow’s warm flank.”
The more I read the poetry of women who have farmed Ireland past, the more clearly I see that there is nothing about this land that hasn’t been known before.
“Don’t cut off rhubarb stalks with a knife,/just twist them clean from the crown, wrote Jane Clarke (in “Her Own”).
And while a hammer calls out the rhythm of the only man for acres, it is just a mess of bootprints by the shed that marks the work of us women. Together we gather enough vegetables to fill the van for the Dublin market. We feast like kings. But when the hammer quiets, the early night shadows any record of our efforts.
While Irish women have sown the seeds and warmed the ovens in this Catholic, profoundly green country, they have also been telling stories. They spoke their words long before they were ever etched on paper. Then came the printing press, and a world of readers who wanted to know this craft of Ireland for themselves.
And now this country has no shortage of authors, generations of women among them.
From 2008 to 2021, poet Chris Murray built Poethead, a database of hundreds of contemporary Irish women poets and their work. Mothers, daughters, workers, farmers, and thinkers. They see the world and dare to answer for it.
The mam on the farm tells me it’s one of the warmest Novembers this country’s ever seen. And as Moya Cannon writes in “Bread,” and the old alchemy of water,/flour and leaven has begun.