COUSIN MARY

Cousin Mary strikes along the seafront at Seaford,

Walking into to the salt wind,

With her red hair streaming behind her.

She’s always dreaming,

So she’s dreaming again,

Of her Ireland of ancestors,

And the country of her heart,

Which is Spain.

She walks along the sea wall,

Past the Martello tower and the beach huts;

“NYAHHHHAYAHYAALLNEERAYHAY!” she shouts,

And then explains, when we ask her why,

That this was a Spanish muleteer’s cry.

Mary ate some mammoth once,

Unfrozen from Siberian ice, then cooked and sliced

At a Royal Geographical Society banquet.

Perhaps the flesh of the prehistoric pachyderm

Lets her access spatial and temporal dimensions,

Where others cannot be.

So there is Cousin Mary in a quiet English seaside town,

Calling out to other places and times,

There she is, we see her there,

But Cousin Mary is anywhere and everywhere.