With a chipped enamel bucket my Granny would send me up to the well-field.
“We’ll have that for the spuds,” she’d say.

And I would step down onto the worn flinty stone, dip and wait the drag of water to glop fill the bucket and lift.

I marvelled always at the clean sheen of spilled spring water as I heaved
that bucket out of the silvered silence,

and onto the breeze shimmered grassy ditch. I would then bowl my hands, scoop
and gulp water so sweet, so cold tangy clean,

my heart heaved with simple delight. And I received images then of the others who had come to this magic harnessed place:

those past generations of Mayo farmers, that pre-historic man who first stood here,
staked his claim, marked this place as holy,

and fathered me, generation down generation.

Jimmy O’Connell