STRETCHED ON YOUR GRAVE by SINEAD O’CONNOR. Intro and poem by Maureen Alsop.

I couldn’t say there was a specific time or memory of encountering Sinead O’Connor’s music.

It’s something similar to swimming and losing track of where you are. Suddenly you’re in deep water or being pressured out to some cove by a rogue current.

I remember I missed her Nothing Compared To U Tour, though clearly that hit was my introduction. A hit never defines the depth of an artist. Nor does tearing up the Pope’s picture, nor being boo-ed off stage, nor does finding a different angle on the spirit. She sang for decades straight from her soul.

Some years back I was asked to pick a song for a project called Poets off Poetry.

In that request, I thought only of my favorite soloists: Dylan, Cohen, O’Connor. Hands down her voice is beyond any other.  Singing an old song, an old poem, one written generations before is like water’s renewal along a seven hundred year old river. “I am stretched on your grave and will lie there forever”… what other kind of love is there, but the unconditional one that never forgets?

So, here is what I wrote:

TÁIM SÍNTE AR DO THUAMA*
 

On the day of the battle you said to me, in simple command under goshawk’s

convocation: when you get there do not cross.
 

But I followed the landscape down through an animal’s lingual gesture.

Bodily. Without allegiance. Through the last grove’s blackened pine, I forged

cinder’s undercurrent across the gorge. I lay my hands on the soldier’s ribs

and in unison smooth out the jaundice oak leaves where his body lay—as if

each impression might circulate bell, book and candle.
 

The pious grit their teeth—wade through the 17th-century walls behind me—

every time I hear any song. And I always say, ‘Sinead would sing that so much better’…It’s a fact.
 

Stereo Story 840
 

*Táim sínte ar do thuama, translated from Gaelic, means “I am stretched on your grave.”

See also the PopPoetry deep dive into Stretched On Your Grave and Rijn Collins’ piece about Jackie (including footage from our Albury 2024 show).

Maureen’s piece was also published in her 2021 collection, Pyre.