Gillian was slender

and talked to us in Cobh

about The Famine.

She spoke quietly of hunger

with downcast eyes,

then hurried away,

declining an offer to lunch.

She quoted the statistics of

starvation, emigration, and fever,

wrapping them in poetry

like masticated grass

on English scones.

She understood our ignorance, she said,

but took the hundred euros

we offered her for speaking—

(fifty for groceries, we hoped,

to stock the coffin holds

of dangerous scholarship).