The lost landscape

We are in West Cork,
treasuring the landscape
and its beauty, ravaged though it’s been
over many hundred years
by nature, and by man.

It is still early
in the new millennium
which, for this fair country,
has brought a brief
but now belittled bounty,
leaving little of an imagined
golden dawn.

Almost endless empty houses,
or blighted building
on palatial plots of land
sadly speak of dreams
embraced so fulsomely,
but now demolished.

In this landscape 
of such loveliness,
and soaring space,
the vision faced is one
of aspirations checked,
of grandeur grounded.

No matter what the cause,
the dreaming was distorted, 
and the siren signals never seen.
From nowhere, from apparent plenty,
money is marooned,
and these proud properties, 
with their plans and plots of land,
so rich in promise,
now are paupered.

Here, in West Cork,
there is once more a famine, 
and, as in the past, another failed future.
It is a landscape littered 
lavishly with loss.

Or so it seems.
The landscape lies implacable;
it is not lost: 
its loveliness will linger,
its strength survive,
and bravely bear the cost.

December 2015, but based on our holiday in Caragillihy in 2012.