Lament; or Trump's hotel in Doonbeg

Lament; or, Trump’s hotel in Doonbeg
 
 
The golf course running along the sea front
stretches north from a cluster of buildings 
styled as mock Victorian village square
built in shelter of the dunes of Doonbeg,
in county Clare, where colours are soft, 
 
where marram grass bends to the eye 
running across from real village over 
bog-burren to meet sea-sky scape,
reminding us of a Paul Henry painting;
and of Riders to the Sea, Singe’s play 
 
after a story he’d heard on Inishmaan, 
about a man whose body was washed up 
on the shore; of the scene when a ghost 
is seen riding on a horse; the lament 
of a grief-stricken widow, her sons 
 
all dead in the dreaming of the play. 
Down for a wedding, wearrive at the back
entrance (villagers advised the shortcut) 
beside public access to the beach, a beach 
the owner didn’t own. Village burghers 
 
had had their hands shaken by politicians, 
the hotel was good, a triumph, they said, 
jobs for the locals, but the locals were not 
very vocal, a shyness in their serving, 
near winking apologies for having 
 
taken the jobs, for taking the soup. 
On the beach the next morning, 
a pastiche of dark modern gothic 
silhouetted on the sky behind me, 
a man standing in shallows holding 
 
a rope attached to a horse circling 
round him, hooves plashing the waves 
breaking into land where the Atlantic 
crashes into Ireland; alone, man, horse,
to the west, America, North America. 
 
 
Copyright © ALISON HACKETT, 2020

Reading (from 36mins) on Rattle's 'Poets Respond' live stream on 8 November 2020