Could you ever make room,
Standing round your well of sorrow?
Could you break that circle of mourning?
Brittle with age, but still serviceable,
And admit other foes
Who, maybe, bore the very essence
Of your heartbreak -
But, broken too, repent?
Would anything right get built
On such split ground?
Would anything hopeful stand
On plague dirt sifted
Of definitions, symbols - the clotted matter
That holds our dead closer to heaven
Than those who put them there?
Or must you stay on your bridge of bones,
Forever inviolate with rage,
With no landfall sighted either end.

 

We took Narcissus

For our patron saint,

Coming apart at the seams

In our abbreviate cantons,

With no great persuasion.

Our unrequited fealty,

Our nuclear paranoia

Needs a broader canvass

Than the frayed edges

Of this Kingdom will allow.

 

Dug out of the homeplace

In the small hours,
With the clothes on our backs.
A sorrowful convoy -
Highlanders at either end,
Young boys raised on crofts,
Sensitive to other clearances,
Helped us away to Lisnaskea -
The childer shaking
In the back of an army jeep,
Like beat dogs.
I wouldn't give up my few acres:
I'd sooner rats colonised
My hearth, ate my feed,
Than see it go the other way.
I'd as leave the lintel fell apart,
Than welcome interlopers
The parlour choked with briars
Than gone over to Rome
My sweat cut that peat.
My tears fed crabbit soil.
My blood abides there still.
Unspilled, it's true,
But soiled these many years
By my running.