Easter Rising Triptych: Martyr-Meal*
The Easter Rising of 1916 and the citizens behind the rebels.
Countess Constance Markiewicz with gun, facing sideways (circa late 1920s).
"I went out to fight for Ireland's freedom and it does not matter what happens to me. I did what I thought was right and I stand by it.” - Constance Markievicz during her court-martial, May 4th, 1916.
In Kilmainham yard, a blindfolded woman stands
before chaos’ red wellspring
rigid and reconciled, unkempt and calm.
Were she able to see, her eye would be met
by a theatre of hawk-eyed bayonets
glossed barrels, ripe triggers, the sun’s grey diplomacy.
Sweat pools from her brow like whale-oil.
The wind closes ranks around her.
The gate opens, wide as the mouth of a fabled beast
drooling for its martyr-meal.
She forgets the cell she was hauled from
(for the last week, so awash with darkness),
her uniformed executioners, the iron-voiced officer
intoning his verdict to the flinty air, and the steel
rooted in her spine, lifting her shoulders back.
Her bones, journals, private correspondence
and public records sealed with her signature
will be collected by reverent hands,
dusted down to their exact pallor,
sheathed in a glass casement, and left on display,
her name forever inked amid a sacrificial pantheon.
For now, while the sky bursts into flame,
a sad dignity may come to paint her death,
the knots and snarls of her legacy trailing to the ground
of the very prison-yard where eternity greets her
as neither friend nor enemy.
A chorus of expert gunfire rings through her skull,
buffeting her brain to ruby sap,
jolting her body to the ground like a lopped tree,
decoding her blood into a russet scripture
for fated men to write and chrysalid men
to dredge from memory.
As for her murder, that’s a deed made holy
by repeated recitals of its occurrence,
splitting and deforming
beyond fields ironed out by fog and rain:
the green outcry
of fifteen names, fumigated with reverence.
This is the second in a series of separate Easter Rising-themed poems (three in total). As of today, the Rising was one day away from the surrender of Pearse 119 years ago.
As second-in-command in the Irish Citizen Army, Countess Constance Markievicz, who fought with distinction throughout at St. Stephen’s Green. Upon her arrest, she was detained in solitary confinement at Kilmainham Gaol. Her court-martial was held covertly, and she was sentenced to death. However, on the orders of Gen. John Maxwell, she later had her sentence commuted to life imprisonment based on her status as a woman. She later went on to become the first woman elected to British Parliament (though her Sinn Fein policies prevented her from taking a seat).
Countess Markievicz was later elected as Minister of Labour 1919-1921 in Dail Eireann, as well as the first woman to be elected a Cabinet Minister in Europe.
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