NeuroDivine

I sit where shoppers drift and call,
Through glass and steel and light,
Where once the starving sought relief,
And huddled through the night.

The station hums with wheels and brakes,
The coffee grinders sing,
While footsteps cross the polished floors,
And tills and scanners ring.

Beneath these paths lie buried dreams,
Nine hundred seventy souls,
Who passed through hunger’s bitter gate,
Beyond all earthly goals.

What sounds once filled this selfsame ground,
Before the trains came near?
The cough that lingered in the cold,
The mother’s muffled tear.

The scrape of bowls on wooden boards,
The chapel’s plaintive prayer,
The winter wind through broken panes,
Silence born of despair.

The creak of carts on muddy roads,
The crow above the yard,
The workhouse bell that marked the day,
Its summons stern and hard.

What would they make of this bright place,
These dead from famine years?
The laden shelves, the rushing crowds,
The laughter in their ears.

Would wonder soften hollow eyes
At fruit from distant seas?
At warmth that comes with just a touch,
At lives enjoyed with ease?

Or would they ask, in accents lost,
If hunger still has power?
If any child goes cold to sleep
In this more prosp’rous hour?

The shoppers pass, the trains depart,
The autumn sunlight falls,
Yet mem’ry moves beneath the stones
And through these busy halls.

So may we hear, amid the noise,
The voices history sends,
And hold the famine dead in mind,
Not ghosts, but fellow friends.

The trains arrive, the lights burn late,
The crowds flow to and fro,
Yet some say when the station sleeps
Old voices rise below.

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Writing this poem this morning as I visit Kilkenny once more, I was struck by how little distance there really is between us and the nearly thousand people buried here. MacDonagh Junction is bright, modern and almost relentlessly contemporary—trains, glass, coffee, scanners, movement—yet beneath it lies the memory of people who knew hunger, cold and the workhouse.

They are not remote figures from some unreachable past. They lived, hoped, feared, and loved on this self, same ground. The poem grew from that strange nearness: the sense that, in such a modern place, history is still only just beneath our feet.