Hope has teeth!
A poem of mine and my reflection years later.
For a long time after my husband Isaac died, I would go to Davy Spillane’s Caoineadh Cú Chulainn the way some people go to church. I am a believer don’t get me wrong- but that tangible song was a springboard for me.
It became the place I visited my grief — intentionally, almost tenderly, like pressing a bruise to be sure it still remembers. To wake from the nightmare and see its still all true. Most of all to have my heart held and my diaphragm primed so I could in fact release my sobs.
The uilleann pipes felt like the only sound vast enough to hold what lived inside me then. The bellows under the arm, the breath through leather, the ancient cry of it — sharp, honest, searing. It helped that my father loved this instrument, he was a drummer and had said if he had picked up another instrument it would be Uilleann Pipes.
Davy’s rendition of Caoineadh Cú Chulainn was other wordly- it hurt, but it was a truthful hurt. A fire I sat beside because it was the only warmth grief offered. I sat by this fire often enough to one day write lyrics for this air.
Most mornings I drove the coast road to work in Spiddal wrapped in silence or shock. The grief lived in my mouth like salt. (To this day I still have struggles with my mouth and tongue.) The car became like an altar — the only place I could fall apart and still arrive somewhere. A sacred place to hold my pain.
Then, when my body could bear something other than keening, I began to let the radio speak to me.
Marty Whelan’s morning show on Lyric FM became a soft landing for me— a voice that asked nothing of me. It was just music. Just morning. He has a sunny voice. Like my Isaac did- even his anme meant laughter.
Before that, I lived mostly inside songs that made me cry — Lianne La Havas especially — her voice was like water pushing against stone. She cracked me open when I was too numb to start. That’s why I bought a guitar, My first birthday after Isaac died. I remember deciding I would do it alone.
The first tiny thought of singing, of songwriting, came like a shy animal. Something in me was trying to live.
And then one morning — Marty played Woodbrook, a stunning song by Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin.
It filled the car with lightness and curiousity it was devastating.
I cried again, but differently. Less like drowning — more like a controlled release.
Like the old medieval bleedings — not punishment, but remedy — letting the body survive itself.
Woodbrook carried hope, but she was hope with teeth —
soft-skinned, but biting, pulling me toward a future I didn’t yet know how to want.
Because hope after death is its own kind of grief.
To feel even a flicker of it is to admit the world keeps turning,
even when yours has stopped.
It frightened me — the thought of surviving.
There was guilt in that — survivor guilt, ordinary guilt,
the guilt of stepping one inch beyond the love that made you.
And still, something in me leaned toward it —
like riverwater reluctant but obedient to the sea.
So this poem I will share honors this confusion and curiousity-
my love still lives between Spillane’s lament and O’Súilleabháin’s movement.
Between the bellows-breath and the stream.
Where love is both honeyed and searing.
Where memory clings, and the body tries — trembling — to go on.
If you want to feel the poem the way it was born:
listen to Caoineadh Cú Chulainn first — sit by the wound, the ancient fire,
then Woodbrook, and feel how grief begins to move.
Between them is where my love lived.
Between them is where this poem came from.
Where she — and I — still linger.
My Love
My love lives between the world’s of
Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin and Davy Spillane
In pockets of memory
Journey’s such as ‘Woodbrook’ and
‘Caoineadh Cú Chulainn’.
My love dances me dizzyingly
resembling fingers that
Flit like hummingbirds on ebony and
Ivory keys
Or like elbows that squeeze solo breaths
From a leather lung
Sometimes full of sweetness
Honey searing pain, sticky, tasty
And unyielding
Almost addictive, she clings
With her scents of blossoms since withered
Cursed empty promises
Yet between the bellow breaths and complex harmonies
My love lingers.