Home is powdered white.
Snow and lines of *******
a little flurry
a blizzard of children, the needy,
the restless.
It's a kind of mania, a hiraeth,
a grá for a place once loved
but washed from the hands forever.

The South China Sea swallows me,
and I wonder if I can taste Atlantic.
The salt breeze, does it carry you in it?
Does it carry a thousand nights
in the frigid cold
hungry and drunken and trying
to get home?

It's not home,
it doesn't smell of home,
and on seeing gold the copper seems
tarnished red as blood
and yet the gold just doesn't settle right.

The sea here is turquoise
at home is green and at home home
is indigo. A hundred times indigo,
blue as the sky and the eyes of my mother.

When they say it with a foreign accent
it sounds so far away.
Killala my hometown,
the sinner's bay.