Stonehaven

According to the local historian’s
Highways and Byways guide,
Irish navvies rioted here in 1848,
drank the town dry, ripped branches
from Dunnottar Woods to sharpen as staves,
smashed every lit window, beat a man dead
and the rampage only ended when troops
arrived from Aberdeen. The agitators
(not heard of since) were shipped to Van Diemen’s Land.
I know what guidebooks do not tell:
anguish like a rash that runs
through scant, perfunctory lines,
famine years and palmed-out pay
that emptied half a county of men,
loss and longing that find no lamp,
The Erse and brogue of migrant pleas
dismissed at each merchant’s door.
I know because my bloodlines wind
to fields and lanes like these,
the oral map of history runs through me
like an heirloom song.
I am not like but am like them
and in my forebears’ steps from farm and glen
to factory lanes, I chanced up here:
White collar, not blue; my fingers clean
and uncaloused that work the keyboard
not the shovel or the lathe,
and thinking how this town, where once
my kind were cursed and cursed the natives back,
might finally live up to the haven of its name.