Alive, Alive O

To look around the corner of a time, a hovering, and know that there is more, a gathered mist of portent stealing comfort, roiling waters calmed amid the dust trails of a heritage that didn't want to be disturbed— there's incentive for another breath, another setback for the march of death along the pathway of a life that only stopped to wonder just a while ago. It is Molly Malone who calls us past the curtain of the years, imploring with a voice heard only as an echo, as a haunting fantasy, perhaps encrusted sentiment that moment in the Dublin fog where we thought we saw her there again. How curious the parallel that we would long to bring her back, for it is history in all its darkness that congeals into a strange nostalgia, speaks in distant cries that it is we who vivify the murky ghosts— who see ourselves alive in Molly's shade! It is the gentle earth that feeds us. Consuming and consumed we share an immortality we do not understand; we are gifted, rising from the sea no more confined, and still we hear across the ages, Molly's cry assuring us we do not die, her voice across the square we know, "Cockles...and mussels alive, alive O..." ~