Can I recount my genealogy? Does it matter? Can I trust the samples, the documents, the pigments? The culture I was born to, is it a culture? Are we people? Is the severance from the past understandable? Does it matter? What matters? What ties me to my ancestors? My old people are buried widely. Do they go back to Africa? Am I not a black man whose pigment has faded living so north and now so south? Who are my old people? I hear myself say many names. Norse and Norman raiders. Welsh Celts. Gaelic Scots and Irish. Luddites from Yorkshire. I’m far from home, far from the Mother Country I know home to be. A land raided by savage folk akin to me. Are my ancestors so wretched I cannot hear the songs of the goddess here? Am I? Does black mould infect the psyche of my people? Does cheese and herb? Tesco’s? Are my cultural ancestors my forthcomings? I come from pot and axe people, assemblers of stone, cord makers and carvers. Why did the paternal saint of Ireland sever the heads of animists, banish serpents, when Christ before Rome an animist himself? I’m travelling too fast for pilgrimage. Time cuts. Buses and trains in this old Mother Country are fleecing my little family. Fear in the eyes of cars passing, our erect thumbs, smiling roadside. Is it my beard and missing teeth that scare? Is it my old woollen hat? Why are we such freaks courting empty seats? Is it not just economy but connection we seek? Is fear nothing other than a buttress built from mistrust? From severance? Inside these four-wheeled cities a false provenance sits. What heritage of walling away life possesses me? Would I pick myself up?

The fort on Inis Mor in the Aran Islands where Patrick spoke out the first iteration of this poem is named after Aonghus mac Óg (or Aengus), a god of love, youth, and poetic inspiration from the Tuatha Dé Danann – the mythological race of supernatural beings in early Gaelic tradition. It is claimed to be the oldest stone fort in Western Europe.