A Poem in English and Irish by Dan Murphy

Elephant’s Wish

The elephants walk into evening
past the reserve they’ve eaten clean.
They carry memory in their bellies
listening into the distance with their feet.

Behind them, the last clouds of diesel
blacken the night. Rows of rubber trees
edge closer, their bitter milk leaking in buckets.
Ahead, across the water, a tractor rumbles home.

On the wind, the elephants smell a harvest ripen.
A mother leads them to the river,
the whole herd falling in line
like the Irish before me queuing for soup.

She swims and they swim and they are
as far as they’ve ever been. And after a long walk
and a soft step through chain link, there is
more than soup—sugar cane and dragon fruit,

some bananas as yellow as the sun. They sleep
in soft grasses and rest in beds of wheat.
They eat their fill. Each day presents
a new gift to open. Sacks of rice piled   

behind delicate steel doors, fresh water
in porcelain bowls that fill with a touch.
Such promise makes migrants
of them, foreigners in their own world. 

Travelling north, they find and drink wine in gallons
but what they taste and dream is this sweetness
of wandering, of belonging everywhere,
of passing out under a sky of moving clouds, 

feeling the summer sun go in and out
as it had for their ancestors in all this space,
in all this space to sleep and eat and slake
this thirst no different than ours. 

Mian Eilifint

Siúlann na heilifintí tráthnóna
taobh amuigh den chaomhnú a bhí ite glan acu.
Tá cuimhne acu ina mbolg
agus éisteann siad leis an talamh trína gcosa.

Taobh thiar dóibh, dorchaíonn na scamaill deiridh den díosail
an oíche. Fásann na crainn rubair níos gaire, ag sceitheadh
a mbainne searbh. Trasna an uisce,
an tarracóir ag tormáil abhaile san oíche.

Ar an ghaoth, boladh na heilifintí bia.
Treoraíonn máthair amháin iad chuig an abhainn,
agus leanann an tréad go hiomlán í
cosúil leis na hÉireannaigh romham ag scuaine roimh anraith.

Snámhann sí agus snámhann siad agus tá siad
chomh fada is a bhí siad a riamh. Agus tar éis siúlóid fada
agus céim bhog trí nasc slabhra, tá níos mó ná anraith –
cána siúcra agus torthaí dragan

agus bananaí chomh buí leis an ngrian. Codlaíonn siad
i bhféar bog agus cruithneacht.
Itheann siad go dtí nach mbíonn ocras orthu
agus is bronntanas é gach lá é sin dóibh. Málaí ríse

cruachta taobh thiar de dhoirse sadhlann. Fíoruisce
i mbabhlaí poircealláin atá lionta le teagmháil.
Gealltanas den sórt sin déanann sé eisimircigh amach as dóibh,
strainséirí ina ndomhan féin.

Níos faide ó thuaidh, aimsíonn siad agus ólann siad fíon ina ngalúin
ach an rud a bhlaiseadh siad agus a aislingíonn siad ná an saibhreas seo
fánaíocht cairdeas, a bhaineann i ngach áit,
ag luí síos faoin spéir na scamaill atá ag gluaiseacht

agus mothú grian an tsamhraidh ag dul isteach agus amach,
mar a bhí aige dá shinsir, sa spás seo go léir,
sa spás seo go léir chun codladh ithe
an tart seo a mhúchadh, nach bhfuil difriúil ná linne.

A Note on Writing in Two Languages:

I descend from immigrants, as many do. My mother recalls her father speaking Slovenian to his mother in their adopted home on the Mesabi Iron Range in Minnesota. My father remembers his grandfather whispering stories to him in Irish after working in the mills in Lowell, Massachusetts. While the imprint of those two cultures survives on me, each side of my family lost their native language during my parents’ lifetimes. That’s extraordinary to me, and heartbreaking.

Encoded in each language lost is a cultural view of the world, and wisdom even. Every language has embedded within in it a distinct way of perceiving the natural and built world. The same is true of English, of course, but it became my language only through a history of political, economic, and social coercion. If we look hard enough, we might even find roots of that violence in its words, phrases, and grammar.

According to the International Institute for Sustainable Development, indigenous peoples account for only 6% of the world’s population, but represent thousands of languages at risk of extinction by the year 2100. The lands they inhabit contain 80% of the world’s biodiversity, and there’s a possible correlation, then, between maintaining an indigenous language and the ability to preserve the natural environment. The cultural respect, understanding, and stewardship of natural resources is something reproduced, not just through the speaking of an ancestral language, but also, it seems, through an ethos preserved within it.

The use of Irish as a primary language has dwindled precipitously. In 2020, lands comprising the Gaeltacht (areas in Ireland where more than two-thirds of the population speak Irish as its first language) had a total population of only 17,000. The language, which derives from the ancient Ogham (called the “tree alphabet” because the letters were made of various names of trees and plants) followed a similar trajectory to trees on the island. As trees were felled to build an empire abroad, the use of Irish fell as well. It was not an accident. British laws restricted its use. Soup kitchens arising from a series of policy-induced famines offered food in exchange for assimilation. An economic system, which assigned different values to Irish life, had been forced upon its people as a way of more easily extracting Ireland’s natural resources and labor, and such a system required a new language.      

Last summer, as I read articles about a herd of elephants marching through China’s cities and countryside, I recognized something of their circumstance immediately. I realized that my place in the world and theirs had been and was still being affected by the same political, social, and economic imperialism. The same forces which had sent my ancestors ever westward—until they had to board a ship fleeing famine and poverty—were at work stripping these elephants of the land required to survive. As the local and global reporting focused on the event as both a mystery and spectacle, I saw it as one of the many signals the natural world has been sending us. When I sat down to write about this, I thought it appropriate to first use a language whose speakers had likewise dwindled to small preserves in remote parts of the world. And as I wrote, I tried to listen to the “language” of the elephants—their instincts and behaviors—to hear through their feet what they might teach us.

Migration is indeed an inevitable outcome of oppression. In light of my family’s migrations, in my own writing as well as my life, learning Irish has been a small but important act of reclamation. Words can travel with us in ways that land and rocks cannot. And so I wrote this poem in Irish for the connections I’ve described, but also as a nod to the elephants, and their own instinctual rebuttal to an unnatural system of living. The poem became for me a meditation on what the elephants might teach us about our ideas of property, indigeneity, and freedom. To articulate this in Irish only furthers that experience of saibhreas—literally, a richness—of possibility, to move freely beyond arbitrary boundaries and expectation.

But I can’t say that I’m thinking in Irish when I compose in Irish. I wish I were at that level in language learning where I could say I even dream in it (I’m not and I don’t). But the experience of writing in Irish makes me reconsider my composition process as a poet. I think more deeply about how to render meaning in a different syntax, how to present a complex idea using a more basic vocabulary, and how to blend the sounds now available to me in a different language. When I write in Irish, I’m forcing myself to see the world through a different lens.

It's the same when writing about animals. There’s a tendency to project upon certain species the characteristics of humans. I try not to do that, but sometimes it’s inevitable. The forces shaping the world and us are the same forces responsible for their ability to survive. To examine their worlds is to examine ours.

A former carpenter, Dan Murphy teaches at Boston University and Emmanuel College, and recently served as Writer-in-Residence at Phillips Academy. His poems have appeared in Sugar House Review, TAB, The Summerset Review, The Adirondack Review, Slipstream, Terrain.org, Rust + Moth, The Indianapolis Review, and elsewhere. His debut collection, Estate Sale, was named a finalist for the 2022 Barry Spacks Prize at Gunpowder Press.

Published January 15 2023