Inis Mor

As usual, I'll be quick with photos, and back later with words. I'm off to Spanish class with Bego this morning, without having written a thing in castellano. Worse, I'm suffering from Spanish r's badly in need of oiling, or some sort if repetitive maintenance, after a solid week in English.

I fell in love with Inis Mor, the largest of the Aran islands, and with the lilting rhythm of the Irish language.

Back on the mainland, I wandered into a wonderful used bookstore in Westport, County Mayo where I met and bought a slightly faded old hardcover - The Aran Reader, full of poems and tales of the Aran islands, including this:



The timeless waves, bright, sifting, broken glass,
Came dazzling around, into the rocks,
Came glinting, sifting from the Americas

To posess Aran. Or did Aran rush
to throw wide arms of rock around a tide
That yielded with an ebb, with a soft crash?

Did sea define the land or land the sea?
Each drew new meaning from the waves' collision.
Sea broke on land to full identity.


Lovers on Aran, from Death of a Naturalist by
Seamus Heaney