While Fionn, a god of Celtic folklore,

the boy who accidentally ate the Salmon of Knowledge

as he prepared the fish of Finnegas

placing a burnt blister from its skin in his mouth,

raged in from the Atlantic as a storm

you huddled up in a room drinking beer.

Dozing until midnight you awoke to darkness,

the only sound Fionn himself, rattling at the window,

gusting his way up and down the streets and valleys

of Cork City as he re-enacted battles of old.

On Washington St. Italian students called

“Si biana, si Bianca!” as white flakes fell.

The Galtee Mts. rose glacial and blue

caked in a petrified frosting

and in The Curragh the rolling plains

prepared themselves for his passage.

Fionn of the Fianna, angered, jilted

pursuing Diarmuid and Gráinne

all the way to Tara, his white hair,

“Si Bianca, si bianca!” fluorescent.

And when there he fell to his knees, spent,

lamenting his lost youth, keening about it all –

the way Fear Doirich has taken his love, Sadhbh,

the way he had refused a sip of healing water to Diarmuid,

the water sand itself slipping through his fingers of time.

And you offered him a drink, explained its similarity to mead,

slumbered some more, dormant as Queen Maeve beneath

dens and warrens as clouds full of snow puffed past the Lia Fáil.