51% British:
Writing the troubles out of my head
Poems 3
Ambush
Lost in a forest of legs,
Beneath the homely ceiling
Of damp green serge and fag smoke,
A girl looks for her father.
He went out on duty this morning,
Bad tempered at the rain,
Late for his own funeral
But real enough, at least,
As she lay in her bed's warm nest.
Later, while she ate her cornflakes,
Still weak with sleep,
A mile away between dripping ditches,
He was rubbed out of the picture
To make room for a new Ireland
The muffled percussion of bullets
Lifted a few starlings,
Who were keeping their feet warm
On telephone wires
That would presently hum with shock.
Later, when raised up to wet eyes
To be cursed with this truth
She wouldn't take it.
Still scrabbling furiously for a gap
In the hateful logic of the wake,
She transmits impotent love -
Unsaid, undone, undying
Receiving no signal in return
Motes and Beams
The trouble with badness
In these parts:
There's just too much of it
To go around.
Bitterness squeezed out,
Around these shapely hills,
But never quite drained away -
The excess pooling, stagnating,
Soaked into your neighbours
Who, fair play to them,
Would never see you stuck
If your Massey broke down,
Or if, misjudging the weather,
You needed the silage in quick
But who:
When push came to shove here, long ago,
Turned a blind eye
(Maybe bruised shut?)
To the causes and effects
Of townland assassination,
To the covert decisions
On life and death
Your kin were subject to
For merely staying put.
The busy mandate of peace,
Intruding in these parts
Where too much was observed
But damn little changed
Should well be cautious -
Traversing sacred ground,
Looking for a hand to shake,
To make things right again.
You'd maybe take it just to square things
With the man upstairs.
But the man next door?
That's another story.
Meatwagon
My father kick-started
A dead man with the heel of his shoe
And swore to me, in drink, he once
Got a mad woman out of a tree
By firing windfall apples at her.
He was half-deafened with blasts
And if you set him up with
A glass of Guinness and a half'un
He might let on darkly about
The wounds in his mind from
Collecting bits of people in bags
Or happier times when an 'Emergency'
Meant being too full of plum poitin
To keep his ambulance between the hedges
After a well-lubricated false alarm
Way out in the never-never.
God knew, a while of his crack
Blunted trauma far better
Than any sterile diagnosis.
His compassion had no side -
He'd seen the similarity of passing souls
Whatever foot they kicked with in life.
There were no atheists on the stretcher
Where in his humble way,
He held everyone sacred.
Control Zone
Who recalls the cringing silence
Of a town centre?
The cowed shops,
Already much wounded,
Blind with plywood cataracts:
Desperate measures,
Posted in black and yellow,
Forbade parked cars to be empty.
- Pedestrian logic, these days -
Because one in a hundred
Would be far too low on its axles,
For any innocent purpose.
A freight of kinetic badness,
Filling the boot.
Mixed with care,
In some Leitrim hayshed
Stymied by such vigilance
Might consequently need
To be abandoned
Somewhere 'softer.'
The course of life and death
Made all the more perverse,
By the bombs
That never went off.