Stolen Green
When the Green Forgot Its Name Once, the island hummed in birdsong silk, a cradle spun in fog and fire, where rivers wrote in cursive light and mountains whispered love to sea. Her fields were prayers in bloom, each blade of grass a psalm of place— not wealth, but breath, not gold, but grace. But a ship came, full of forgetting. They arrived with names like fences, iron words that split the sky, and maps that bled the living soil into tidy, foreign lies. They took the hills and called them harvest. They took the woods and named them tax. They drowned the stories in stone books, and taught the wind to speak in cracks. She wore a crown of nettle then, our mother— with roots torn from her mouth, her language buried in furrowed rows where ghosts now plough the famine’s drought. The streams no longer sing in Gaeilge. The cows have silence in their eyes. The hedgerows hold their breath for spring that never truly arrives. Still—somewhere behind the hedges, the old tunes twist in hawthorn lim...