“I wonder if you knew how I watched,
            How I crowded before the spearmen.”   
                                              H. D. “Loss”  

Forbidden to say who you were by a geis     
laid while you swam in my womb,
your father could not acknowledge you, a stranger,
despite the twinish appearance.  

Allowed to teach you all I knew except
the javelin of lightning – your father’s demand –
left you vulnerable to the champions’s thrust.
Had he seen me watching, the hero of Eire  

might have guessed, but sword play blinded his eyes
to all but the skill of the youth before him.
Who was this foreign warrior with the lilt of Skye on his tongue
and fine knowledge in combat?

Cuchulainn forgot his own curse
laid before his son’s birth, a seed of destruction.
I watched the grass of Connaught bend with your blood
as Cuchulaiinn grasped reality

in the ring on your hand.
Why had he not noticed, he stammered,
as your face fell pallid.
You died in his arms.  

This mourning mother returns
to an island of mottled boulders
along the cool-lipped sea
to tear an altar on the Isle of Skye.