Ruth Hooley, poet and feminist activist, observed that in 1985 women’s poetry seemed to be less prevalent in Northern Ireland as it was elsewhere, commenting, ‘[t]his silence is ambiguous. Does it mean an absence—there are hardly any women writing?’. This article considers how anthologies of poetry published in the contemporary era in Northern Ireland can be seen as agents of exclusion for women writers at the same time as these anthologies were effectively instating a post– 1960s canon and restating a generational dimension for which poetry from the North of Ireland would become known.

In drawing on the broad context of anthology publication, this article examines how female poets are absent from an otherwise thriving literary culture and questions whether this silence is, as Hooley suggests, ambiguous. In responding to these issues, this article addresses both the commercial business of poetry production alongside the literary representation of women in poetry published in representative publications such as anthologies in order to re–insert women into Northern Irish poetic discussion. By investigating women’s writing as unanthologized and addressing the lack of agency of women figures in verse published by male poets, this article argues that the way in which women are represented inside and outside publication in the second half of the twentieth–century is severely lacking.

The full article is available as a PDF by clicking here

Courtesy of Alex Pryce, originally published in Peer English, a refereed annual e-journal produced jointly by the Department of English at the University of Leicester and the English Association

This anthology is a celebration of women’s voices. While the poems are the work of Word of Mouth Poetry Collective, they are not collective poems; they are the distinctive work of each individual writer. This is our contribution to the blossoming of poetry from women in the north of Ireland and throughout the world.

Word of Mouth Poetry Collective, like so many writing groups, was born out of a need for contact with other writers. We wanted to create an environment in which out poetry would thrive, uninhibited and uncensored (at least by others if not entirely by self), where it would be taken seriously. Primarily our concern is with poetics – in both a pure and a practical sense. Our preoccupation is with the business of word-craft in ferrying ideas and feelings across the water of silence. Unlike the tiger in Kate Newmann’s poem, who chose to drown rather than swim after a life lived in “Such a small space/That every ugly inch was intimate”, we want our poems to swim across the stagnating moat. As Mary Twomey indicates in ‘Eoin’s haiku’, poetry, like every meaningful communication, is a two-way process:

If you smile I shall
Part the bright wave for you, be
A lamp to your feet.

Drawing on our previous experience of creative writing groups, we were clear from the start what this group was about and how it would operate. Each of us is writer, reader and facilitator in turn at our sessions, each with an equal say in, and responsibility for, all that the group does. Some travel distances – from Ballycastle, Omagh, Downpatrick, Newcastle – others only a mile or two to meet once a month in the Linen Hall Library in Belfast. We have been doing this for several years now, expressly to appraise and encourage one another’s work. You could not pay for the quality of critical attention gained in this process. Essentially we are listening to one another as poets and being heard in a society which has not been known for its receptivity to the work of women in any sphere. We live in a place of passionate history, where women’s history goes largely unsung and unrecognised. We cannot afford to forget that our heritage has been a divisive one, in terms of gender as well as religion, politics, class, dis/ability, sexuality and race. It is crucial that voices from all quarters are articulated and heard. And while it has not always been possible or safe for that to be so, poetry in the North – as in many divided and war-torn societies throughout the world – has the imaginative scope to counter silences of very different kinds. For instance, Gráinne Tobin’s witty and moving poem, ‘Ladies’ Night’, in which

A dozen women settling round a table,
In the community centre proudly
Muralled in red-white-and-blue …

make a ‘rag-rug’ poem of their experiences as “army wives always on duty”, trusting and risking the poet, in order to do so:

We bind with secrecy,
Names, ranks, addresses to be left behind,
Remnants of these salvaged lives,
When I return to mine, the other, side.

A different silence is broached in Eilish Martin’s poem, ‘A Death in Autumn’, in which she gives voice to a woman condemned to death by hanging according to the laws of the ancient society in which she lived.

Of course, there are constraints which our meetings cannot dispel, such as lack of time, of opportunity, of publishing and performance outlets, and so on. Rather than complain about this state of affairs, we agreed to become more visible: to run readings and workshops with other writing groups. We even put on a festival in Ballycastle in 1993 – one of a series initiated by poet Noelle Vial in Killybegs, County Donegal, and taken up by a number of other groups, including Belfast and Newtownards writers’ groups.

In retrospect, our efforts can be seen as part of a growing movement challenging the traditional, confining categories into which the arts (and writing in particular) have been boxed. The hierarchical distinction between community and academia, amateur and professional, popular and @elite, is of dubious value. Serious artists tend not to be taken seriously if they are too closely associated with community writing; part-time writers (often the halfway house which women stop at – for historical, social and personal reasons) do not take themselves seriously, alienated by these distinctions. You cannot help questioning the thinking behind such a dual value system, particularly when you look at how a piece of work may be judged according to which ‘side’ it is deemed to be coming from rather than by its content. It is only by engaging with the work itself that we can come to trust and develop our own judgement instead of relying on a readymade yardstick which has so often proved to be at best a crude and inaccurate approximation, at worst completely missing the mark. You only have to think of Emily Dickinson for the classic example of someone who was so rebuffed by blinkered criticism that “in her lifetime she saw her name in print only once – when she won second prize for Rye and Indian bread at the Amherst Show” (Donna Dickinson, Emily Dickinson, 1985).

Many of the poems in this anthology question given perspectives. Running through Joan Newmann’s deceptively pastoral vignettes of Greek women, there is an undercurrent against the tide of orthodoxy. This surfaces in ‘Kiria Maria’ to challenge religious teaching by effectively overshadowing the Church’s pronouncement on disability, “That child is a judgement of God” – “That child should not have been born”, with the silent, supremely Marian image of Mother and Child. A shared concern with the impact of given perspectives results in very different poems. Ann McKay deftly poeticises the childhood game of ‘The farmer wants a wife’ to mirror complex social dynamics while simultaneously subverting them. In ‘Of earth and air’, Eilish Martin reclaims the experience of birth in a deeply symbolic poem which creates its own myth by disowning a standard one:

Though you laboured in a shortened bed between
Narrow sheets biting on your tongue
Till it bled I was born elsewhere.

My birthing pool can be found in the meltwater of a
Dream where you
Briefly stood your ground …

The concept of an anthology of our work seemed like a logical step to extend our readership. Despite the upsurge of women poets in Ireland, comparatively few have been published from the North – and those only in very recent years. The highest ration of women poets to men to appear in an anthology of Irish poetry since 1960s is four to seventeen (The New Younger Irish Poets, ed Gerald Dawe, Blackstaff Press, 1991). However, while there is a very generous representation of northerners in this collection, none of them are women. In several anthologies of modern Irish and Northern Irish poetry there are no women at all or, at best, one or two. One of the main reasons for this discrepancy is to do with selection procedures. Editors of anthologies usually select work only from those poets who have already been published in book form. This automatically rules out most women poets in the North. However, things are changing. At least four women living in Northern Ireland – plus two from Donegal – brought out debut collections in 1995, once of them a member of Word of Mouth, Joan Newmann. There is a growing awareness that women do write poetry and that both men and women read poetry regardless of gender. We hope that this anthology will go some way towards closing the gap, that it will indicate to readers that there are many women out there writing poetry worth reading, and that it will encourage others to close the gap still further. The poets in this anthology come from both sides of the divide and neither side. All have lived for at least fifteen years in the North, most of them all their lives. Some bring the experience of growing up in another place to their poetry, creating poems out of that experience but also poems which look into cultural aspects of Northern Ireland from the outside. Ann Zell offers poems about her Idaho upbringing and poems about living in Ireland – such as her restrained encounter with a German tourist in ‘Interlude’ and her witty comments in ‘Nature programme’ on the particular significance of overhead noise in this part of the world:

Before there were helicopters
There were dragonflies.
And will be, after.

‘Family values’ is a term that has been exploited to the hilt by politicians and moralisers over the last decade, when of course the family can be a force for good or bad – and is usually a mixture of both. This theme is explored by several poets with subtlety. A child’s perspective is the focus in Margaret Curran’s ‘Heartburn’ and Elaine Gaston’s ‘Punishment’, wheras a retrospective viewpoint is expresased in Ann Zell’s ‘Fossil fuel’ and Ruth Carr’s ‘We Share The Same Skin’. Frequently a fusion of both coincides, as in Kate Newmann’s ‘My mother and I painting Galway Bay’ and Pia Gore’s ‘Tractor to Glenaan’.

Some of us have come late to writing, some have written all our lives. For some reason it is only deemed appropriate to describe writers as ‘emerging’ if they are youngish. This seems ageist and certainly ignorant of how women (such as northern novelists Janet McNeill and Frances Molloy) come to writing in fits and starts with many interruptions along the way. As Tillie Olsen has pointed out in her collection of essays, Silences (1965):

“Compared to men writers of like distinction and years of life, few women writers have had lives of unbroken productivity, or leave behind a body of work. Early beginnings, then silence … clogged late ones … long periods between books … characterise most of us.”

Regardless of our individual ages, we could all be described as emerging poets – emerging from the silence and invisibility of women who have been writing poetry for years, yet only now are getting around to challenging our own and others’ tunnel vision about what can claim a place on the bookshelf. We hope you enjoy these poems.

Published in: Word of Mouth (Blackstaff 1996), edited by Ruth Carr, Gráinne Tobin, Sally Wheeler and Ann Zell.

We are living in a decade which has seen the setting up and expansion of women-only publishing houses throughout the world. A whole new commercial apparatus has come into being whereby more women writers are at last gaining recognition. Without the increasing demand for books by and about women the disproportionate silence would continue. The time is hopefully past when a male nom de plume was a pre-requisite for publication; or when an introduction by an eminent person was felt necessary to validate the work of a female author (eg Lord Dunsany’s introduction to Bridie Steen by Anne Crone.)

Here in Northern Ireland there is little evidence of any such evolution. Relatively few female authors find their way onto reading lists for higher and further education courses. Few female authors stare out from the covers of locally published fiction and poetry. (For instance, The Blackstaff Press’s ration of single-author poetry books is in the region of two female to fifteen male poets.) This silence is ambiguous. Does it mean an absence – there are hardly any women writing? Is it due to suppression – women lack confidence and opportunities to develop their writing? Is it a result of oppression – women are discriminated against in terms of what is taken seriously and which material matters? Or is it a passive resistance by those who find the language so steeped in gender-biased values as to be alien and inadequate to express their meaning?

In publishing this first collection of writings by Northern Irish women writers the Northern Ireland Women’s Rights Movement is not outing forward a particular viewpoint or political slant. The Female Line is feminist in that the book is a women-only publication. However the contents express the many different voices of women in and from Northern Ireland, drawing on their actual experience and creative imagination. This anthology is unusual in two ways: it includes both published and previously unpublished female authors side by side, writing in a wide range of forms and styles. The result is a miscellany of poetry, verse, short stories, reflections and extracts from novels and plays. The aim of the book is to highlight what is being written and to encourage more women towards publication. It is left to the reader the judge whether women write differently from men, are concerned with separate issues, or approach language differently.

As editor I have tried to select what is representative and of genuine interest. Finding the predominant themes to relate to family and personal life, the pieces are arranged in an informal sequence which moves through childhood, adolescence, growing awarenesses, personal relationships at various stages, marriage, motherhood, disillusionment, independence and old age. Woven through these is another common theme, ‘The Troubles’ (these never being very far from the door).

With the concentration of focus on the home and family, it might have seemed appropriate to give this collection a title identifying women with their traditional role. But this would have ignored the emergence of women’s lives beyond the limitations of the domestic situation. Themes of escape, of the imagination, and more particularly the birth of a self as an independent, political being are central to the developing literature of women writers. What emerges most readily from these writings are mixed feelings of dis-satisfaction, alienation, affection and humour: a sense of belonging and disowning. The Female Line is both handed-down and self-written. I hope that it will be read with this in mind.

Published by: Northern Ireland Women’s Rights Movement

At the Winter Park ski-holiday reunion
who swans in only Stevie
whose legs don’t take him far
- he’d been tinkering under a car
when the bomb went off.

Answer: the skin.
It’s Trivia night
and we’re in with a chance.
All the other tables are offering liver.
What is the largest organ in the body?

In Winter Park we’re triple-wrapped
in thermals
but he’s shirtless:
a sophisticated instrument
of thermo-regulation.

Homoeostasis: the body
is a furnace.
The sweat-glands
and erector pili muscles
co-operate to keep the body cool.

The hypothalmus
is conductor of the body’s
secret business;
but skin grafts don’t have glands
and scars are bald.

Anyway Stevie has walked
the twenty yards from his special car
and he’s wrecked
and his stumps are sore
and we get tore in to the drink

and we all get legless
and everyone in the Welly Bar
(we’re only here for the ramps
and we’ve jumped the queue)
is legless and Stevie has taken his off

all smooth American tan
with the socks and the cool shoes on
and we laugh out loud
at the pretty woman
on stilts who almost

jumps out of her skin
and the plastered people
who swear
they’re seeing things
and we know they are.

Winter Park Colorado is home to the U.S. National Ski Centre for the Disabled

This year I tried on voices just like hats.

Whore hat
Bored hat
Life’s a fucking chore hat
Tore hat
Sore hat
Never bloody score hat
Can’t take any more hat
Roar hat
Soon be thirty-four hat.

I was running out of fabric

But then I found a blessed hat
Poetry obsessed hat
Need a bloody rest hat
Got to go out west hat
Realised that politics are best avoided
Put on my Sunday best hat
Soon got bored with that.

Tried on my dead serious issues hat
My rhyme all the time hat
My why can’t I write like Paula Meehan hat
My fek it have a drink and write like Brendan Behan hat.

This year I tried on voices just like hats
The weather changed
The cease-fires came
And screaming like a banshee
My severed tongue grew back.

š-

My father wore a hat when I was little
we lived in Omagh O-M-A-G-Haitch or -Aitch
as tribally decreed.
He was a travelling salesman for ice-cream;
a Dublin firm Hughes Brothers or H.B.
he was their Northern Ireland diplomat.

He knew his clients well - a studied discipline,
some would not buy HB ice-cream on principle.
My father’d done his homework;
to some he’d sell Haitch
B, to others Aitch B.

One day in Derry/Londonderry my father’s car was hijacked.
The men wore hats pulled down with holes for eyes and mouth.
They held a gun, they nudged his hat.
They asked my father where we lived
and ordered him to spell it.

- š

This year I tried on voices just like hats.

Lisfannon, Buncrana, Bunduff, Mullaghmore, Rossnowlagh.
The best places to swim were always over
the border. In the car killing time

we played I spy with my little eye…
and Spot the soldiers, their camouflage
too dark for August grass

…something beginning with
h… The wee white house, windows for eyes
one either side of the thick red line on the map.

We imagined the little old woman -
she was always little and old -
waking each morning in the

South and having eggs
for breakfast in the North
and maybe crossing again

to clean her teeth
and check her hair
in the big old bathroom mirror

in the South.
What accent would she use?
Did her cattle favour

Southern or Northern
grass? Where did they give good milk?
And where did her children

go to school and did they like to change
their accents too and did they ever
get confused?

-

The sea and Southern bread, and sweets we couldn’t get
at Auntie Maggie’s shop. Skittles, Golden Crisp,
and richer, smoother, creamy Dairy Milk.

In the sweet-shop in Buncrana, women
smile at us and call us refugees. We learn
to use our strongest

Northern accents
and look sad. This guarantees
free sweets at the beginning.

-

Back home, we never knew
when Auntie Maggie’d come to stay.
We knew to open the windows

when the siren went. We knew
if an inspector called that this
window or that door

hadn’t been broken before.
We knew that Auntie Maggie’s blood pressure
was bad and that it blew sky-high -

she’d get bloodshot eyes -
each time an unattended car
appeared outside the shop

but that mostly people forgot
and it was nothing,
a scare. And then it wasn’t

and she’d come to stay
and her Maeve didn’t eat gravy
and she didn’t have to

and Auntie Maggie’s boys could say bad words
and nothing happened
and they could eat sweets all the time

and she’d say nothing
and they were ruined.
And when the windows came in all the sweets

in the shop would be ruined too
and even the ones buried at the bottom
and even the ones in the store-room that didn’t have

a window
would have to be destroyed
but we would have eaten them anyhow

and we could have cried
at the thought
of all that waste.

I believe to have one dog is better
than a hundred thousand cats, I believe
whatever anybody older than me says

except my older sisters who know nothing
and our neighbours, the Mc Devitts,
who have far too many cats.

I believe what Mum and Dad,
my teachers and the priests
tell me is right and that,

believing them, I’ll be right too.
I believe there’s a right way of doing things,
I believe in the essential beauty

of the thing done right and in always,
always doing the right thing.
I believe any job worth

doing is worth doing well,
I believe that God’s a Catholic,
that he’s everywhere, I believe

it will be twenty years
before I hear the thing
about the many ways

to skin a cat and I
believe that even then
I’ll wonder which one’s right.

Just to be there would not be enough:
To stop at neighbours’ gates and ask,
Have you heard the news? And see their faces

Seeing your face.
Behind shop counters, men would shake their heads.
You wouldn’t feel like doing anything that day,
Maybe just watching tides and the horizon.

Images sent to the world on amateur video
Over and over like traditional music,
‘til you learn to open your eyes through the whole sequence,
Sean-nós, pure pitch with the grace-notes of agony.
The decent lens can scarcely frame or focus.
There’s an emptiness in the scattered street
Where women wander, talking to the wind,
Blood on their faces, looking for each other.
Something universal, yet so much like home,
You want to go over the shock of it again,
Not to leave them straying by themselves
In the aching gleam of hospitals, the dimmed cortèges.

Scanning beach news-stands for yesterday’s foreign papers,
We’re helpless here as we’d be helpless there.
A correspondent interviews survivors:
Everyone knows everyone in a place like that.

From: Banjaxxed, Summer Palace Press, 2001

I put on the peace like a warm overcoat in the October chill
John Wilson Foster

Weans happed against the All Souls’ Night wind
Huddle with their parents’ arms around them
Where galaxies of District Council stars
Glamorously explode above the patient crowd
In reckless fountains and cascades of light,
Sparklers displayed on velvet sky and mountain.

Searchlights spin, rockets and Catherine wheels
Illuminate the gasping, flinching faces
As they get used to bangs that mean no harm,
And volunteers, smiling in Day-Glo tabards,
Collect small change in buckets. Now hold steady
As flying bomblets burst, gunpowder clouds
Benignly fall to earth like common incense.

From: Banjaxxed, Summer Palace Press, 2001

Carved names make skin prickle,
Bumps rise, as we read whose graves
We’re walking over on our holidays.
On limestone or granite
In shady cobbled squares
Every village lists its children
Dead for France.

Stone cross planted by a vineyard,
Miles out of town; who has left red flowers?
Fifty years on, we’re tourists here,
Driving past a murder.
My atavistic right hand twitches like a dowser’s
Towards my forehead in the sign of the cross –
God between us and all harm –

But back at home, we won’t stare at the flowers
Pinned in bunches to the city shopfront,
Or wired to the roadside fence
Where the crater’s filled, the asphalt patched.
We’ll lower our eyes and drive on, shivering,
Resisting the reflex gesture or collaborating
in the Ulsterisation of grief.

From: Banjaxxed, Summer Palace Press, 2001

July was worst. A young man pulled a knife
On him one evening after closing time,
The pearly sealight fading, as their roof
Shook to the ladders of the bunting squad.

Often at night they would be loudly jolted
From their deep lovers’ sleep by unseen fists
Thumping the windowpane beside their bed,
Insults in accents not yet understood.

They stuck it out, in disbelief at first.
Still the waves played along the rocky shore,
Black guillemots nested in the granite harbour.
Village life takes patience, they were told.

The pounding and the jeering petered out;
Soon they put right their house and bought a pram.
Bunting bloomed discreetly each July.
From fear or tact, they spent the Twelfth away.

In time the news was bad. The threats began.
Pregnant, she picked the shards of window glass
Out of the toy box, and arranged to sell.
Not quite intimidation, the policeman said.

From: Word of Mouth, Blackstaff, 1996

The doorbell chimes its four suburban notes,
A tall shadow shifts in frosted glass.
In their new house she hardly psues to wonder
If this might be the one
Everybody hopes will never come to them.
Round here, expect a load
Of firewood, sacks of spuds for sale,
A neighbour’s charity raffle.

The man is smiling hesitantly
Under his sepia-tinted moustache.
She looks past him for the farm van
And sees he’s one of a pair –
His partner’s climbing the steep wet slope
To the houses across the street.
Just as she spots the rebuff not yet uttered
Forecast in his eyes (for she has a surfeit of spuds)
He speaks his single line:
I’m canvassing for Sinn Féin in the election.

She’s suddenly freezing, as their glances meet.
No, quickly, I don’t approve of violence.

Banned, he turns back down the path
As civilly as he came,
And she’s the one who’s sorry
For the prim rejection,
For sending him away in the rain
Without exchange or explanation,
For letting him make his own strange sense
Of prosperous citizens who think that killing
Is a vulgar habit, and trust the courts for justice.

From: Banjaxxed, Summer Palace Press, 2001

Here is the place:
Where the river runs quietly
Through the cosy town,
Past weavers’ cottages, church and library,
Pub garden and swimming baths,
Under the bridge
Among the evening smells of leaves and water,
From the boating steps
They are floating lanterns for Hiroshima.

Silently (for my Irish voice
Might tell too much)
I drop some money in the bowl,
Take a home-made lantern,
Join the murmuring pilgrims
At the water’s edge.
Without speech, I am invisible, and listen.
The cheerful commonplaces
Of their conversation
Are respectful, like small talk round a graveside.
There are no speeches or announcements.

But in the thickening dusk,
Ceremonially, one by one,
They light their votive candles,
Set down thin craft
With paddling fingers
On the calm dark river.
The wind breathes
Into the paper sails,
The lanterns glide downstream,
Glowing, lit from within
Against the darkness,
Till the current carries them
Softly out of sight.
I light my candle, float my lantern
With the rest, watching some catch
In whorls of water,
Flash and twist to ash,
Their flames extinguished
Like the countless dead.

From: Word of Mouth, Blackstaff, 1996

A dozen women settling round a table,
In the community centre proudly
Muralled in red-white-and-blue
Scrolls, red hands with daggers,

Unzip their winter jackets and wait
For me to give them something
They didn’t know they had.
Last week it was the cooking demonstration,

Tonight they’re getting me, one of the other sort,
The creative writing woman, their guest
In spite of church and politics,
For I am trusted to remember

Some hated school, some never learned to write.
I promise them in these two hours together
We will make a poem
Pieced from all our lives.

We lay out scraps of stories on the table,
Pregnancies and births – my own tale first,
A fragment from our female comedy
Offered in all its colours. One decides

To risk me. She begins:
It was a military hospital,
And I a sergeant’s wife.
First births are always hard,

But we sat up for officers’ inspection
Wearing nighties, with our army-issue babies
In their fishtank costs beside us,
The sheets perfectly folded.

It seems some password has been spoken.
In married quarters, says another,
We made love on mattresses
Still wrapped in polythene

For fear of baby stains. The first three feet
Of paintwork could be fingermarked,
But doortops must be polished daily
For spot checks, gardens paraded,

Army wives always on duty.
Our child was nearly blinded once,
Her father on manoeuvres;
They said he’d have to follow

The army or his family. He chose
To love us best. We live here now.
Legitimate targets. And she smiles at me,
Over the rag-rug poem

We bind with secrecy,
Names, ranks, addresses to be left behind,
Remnants of these salvaged lives,
When I return to mine, the other, side.

From: Word of Mouth, Blackstaff, 1996

I plan to go north
by unapproved roads
where sniper signs rust on the trees.

I will cross the border
over and back
several times to see how it feels.

I will dance the pig’s dyke
and taste mountain mayflower
on the breeze.

Near under-fished lakes
I will hear a blood-pause
in the reach of the night

when every word used for batter
and crisis will cruise with the ease
of what runs right through us,

when the shift and fill
of my own dear cells
is all they will tell as they breathe.

And out through the lanes,
I will lie in my form
in overgrown fields

not a chopper in sight.
And they say it is safe
and the weather agrees.

From: Cross-Talk (Bridgend: Seren Books)

​

A landlady as mean as Ireland in the fifties.
The one boiled egg,“it’s a cooked breakfast, isn’t it?”,
Towels with a rough touch exfoliate our skin;
A cowed son who looks as though she’s worn him thin.
They despise us for staying at their meagre B and B.
She’ll turn off the heat once we leave for the day.

In the breakfast room, above the no-brand cornflakes,
the red bloom of the Sacred Heart is bleeding.
And opposite, all smiles, an airbrushed JFK.
Two gods in one? They could do with a good cleaning.

She hears my thought.“I must take them down”, she says,
“put Paisley there, Bigfoot though he is, he led,
and that other fellah, came back to the people in the end
and handsome enough I suppose, in his own way.”

From: Cross-Talk (Bridgend: Seren Books)

​

How many steps back does a soldier take
before he is due to turn around? Long stride.
Short stop. Every gate pillar has potential.
The butcher shop is open today. Fish, fresh
from the lough, hit the counter with a slipped slap.
We are out collecting rubber bullets – pocket money
for the pictures. Internal injuries braised for later.
Watching is too small a word. Desire informs
the way we see them walk. Their tempered dance
is riddled implication. They can turn into a bush
at a given sound. But the foliage is wrong for here.
We know where they are. We want to bring them
tea, hear them try to pronounce our names,
but there’s no way of saying this to camouflage.

From: That Other Island (Bridgend: Seren Books)

​

What do guns when they are not in use?
In dead of night they double and divide,
naming new owners, finding a new ruse.

Carry a gun on stage, it must be fired.
Deterrent only lasts until undone.
Better they are counted out of mind.

List the ways to frame a decommission,
a car-park graveyard covered with cement.
Which stay on stasis is sufficient?

Marking each as put beyond use.
Keeping their provenance as you would art.
Rocking the replicas back to their false start.
It’s got to be efficient.

From: That Other Island (Bridgend: Seren Books)

The tightness and the nilness round that space
when the car stops in the road, the troops inspect
its make and number and, as one bends his face

towards your window, you catch sight of more
on a hill beyond, eyeing with intent
down cradled guns that hold you under cover

and everything is pure interrogation
until a rifle motions and you move
with guarded unconcerned acceleration—

a little emptier, a little spent
as always by that quiver in the self,
subjugated, yes, and obedient.

So you drive on to the frontier of writing
where it happens again. The guns on tripods;
the sergeant with his on-off mike repeating

data about you, waiting for the squawk
of clearance; the marksman training down
out of the sun upon you like a hawk.

And suddenly you’re through, arraigned yet freed,
as if you’d passed from behind a waterfall
on the black current of a tarmac road

past armour-plated vehicles, out between
the posted soldiers flowing and receding
like tree shadows into the polished windscreen.

© Seamus Heaney, permissons Faber & Faber Ltd.

Seamus Heaney here draws on a common experience of people living through the Troubles, of being stopped and questioned by soldiers, to describe the unease of being treated with suspicion and enduring it quietly.

Our Paris part of Belfast has
Decapitated lampposts now. Our meeting
Place, the Book Shop, is a gaping
Black hole of charred timber.

Remember that night with you, in-
valided in the top room when
They were throwing petrol bombs through
The windows of Catholics, how
My migraine grew to such
A pitch, Brigid said ‘Mommy,
I think Daddy is going to burst!’

We all run away from each other’s
Particular hell. I didn’t
Survive you and her thrown
To the floor when they blew up the Co-
Op at the bottom of the street or Brigid
Waking screaming after this
Or that explosion. Really,
I was the first one to go:

It was I who left you …

© Padraic Fiacc, Intimate Letter 1973, 1977

Padraic Fiacc reflects on how fears corrodes the spirit, saying that he simply couldn’t cope after seeing his wife and daughter thrown over by a bomb blast.

The broken sods, a whipped flag,
The broad river beyond. Gunfire
The young graves blotted all over.

Angels of morning light dance
On the silver needles of the estuary.
The helicopter prowls, a dragonfly
Popping its shuttered eyes.

Here we have a pause before rain,
And the clatter of clay
Feet on the porch of heaven.

In the stripped rain we wonder
What is going on here.
The cloudburst seems elegy enough.
Drooked shadows raise

White cellophaned flowers
In the darkened air.
Others kneel one-kneed

On a handkerchief. Cars
Glisten. Cameras at full exposure
Click. Zeiss and Leica
Whirr like crickets. Someone folds

A pistol in waterproof.
He is about to start his dry life,
This one, under the earth roof,

Tunnelling to his companions
In the honeycomb below
That weakens, with its intricacy,
The earth we hide in now.

© Seamus Deane, A Burial, 1983, complete text, History Lessons, 1983, The Gallery Press.

The poem describes an IRA funeral with the flags and the guns, apparently being prepared for a salute, and the media attention. These were often contentious events because of the public paramilitary participation in them.

The flavour of words comes back slowly,
The shy feeling for sentences,
If only after stumbling
In surprise over asking for five rolls.

It’s all so obvious:
What could be more German
Than that cream cake, Torte,
Yet it sounds artificial.

You cannot yet join
In the easy chatter, self-conscious
Even of saying thank you
Too often, pronouncing it well.

You want to participate:
These are rather dear, that’s a bargain,
Those sausages look just right;
Like a child trying your mother’s tongue.

Your mind opens the gate,
Lets phrases through readily,
The weight isn’t right, though,
Too little homely friendliness.

So easy to get lost
In the taste and tangle of a language
On a shopping trip for five rolls
And some meat in your own language.

This dark
Country’s
Clocks.

Your
Fingerprints
On my desk.

The rain
Consoles
Scars.

‘Next year is never
Now is the only time.’

P Kavanagh

As the clouds re-form,
I play with their mirror-image
Of memory, ripple their grey
On grey with the slightest touch
Of my hand: the green stretch,
A little raised sky-line on the flat
Disc of water. Yesterday
Is also today: I come as to an open
Wound asking whether the healing has begun.

Now, the lighter colours
Of last year are no longer
Reflected in the same calm
But even the berries of autumn
Would not pierce its tranquillity.
All its dark patches come
Out of the lining of my coat waiting
For snow to cover and console.

After the exhibition closed,
I should have gone home,
But I stood at the window,
Excluded from future openings,,
Watching the street in the glass
Transformed into line and
Colours and composition: the painting

Never finished, the paint
Never dry, and more of it
For sale. I have almost forgotten
Coney Island’s reflection, but
Perhaps some yesterday will
Become today’s tomorrow.

Because the wind did not subside,
The policeman booked you for bribery;
And you only wanted your five pounds
Changed at the Giant’s Ring: he would
Get his fair share out of the next robbery.

Afterwards lurking cars were banned
And lovers ordered to stay outside;
The poet refused his fee, but accepted
Large expenses instead to make up
For last year and lost walks.

Your painter said he cared for you,
Against the wind, against all dreams,
He offered you all his paintings,
All lost opportunities forgotten,
And later took your money happily.

Too many plots in all the old stories,
Too many cows facing the weak sun
Unperturbed by the cutting winds
Or fading ghosts by the gate-post,
While you wrestle and exorcise.

A gang of boys, schoolboys, kindergarten
Boys, threw stones at your car
As you finally left the ring
And you thought, you were driving
Into a clearer future, a little stronger.

Only the debris remains: they sweep
With slow steady strides, relaxed
And easy-going; there is no threat
Or joy or fear or even triumph
In their action.

Battered tins and broken glass move
Southwards, down the Lisburn Road.
Sometimes the sun breaks through,
A light wind lifts empty crisp-bags
And torn sweet-wrappers; they glitter
And suggest a story.

One of the workmen stops, lifts
A discarded beer-can and slowly,
Deliberately and with great exactitude
Empties its content into a well-kept
Hedge; all his attention focused
And concentrated on this act.

March 3rd 1986

All February, no rain fell. Not a whisper
to lick the dusty glass, just the frost
having a long lie, stretched over the garden,
ignoring the dry cracked soil round its edges.
That morning, the little houses sat sullenly
tensing themselves for the power cuts, drawing
back into their shells, like frightened snails,
waiting. But nothing shook their quiet. The message
had gone home; the shops were shuttered, metal
faces blank in all the streets, closed stiff as ice.
At night, some cracks, some splintering; but sirens
repeated again and again that the fires were distant,
and the shots, and the shouting. We thanked God
we’d kept just on the right side of trouble
again.

Stiff, clean, no creases,
this street bears all the innocence
of a folded tablecloth, evenly
patterned with windows criss-crossed
with net or lace, like a chain
of paper dolls holding hands,
opaque, making a blindness
to hide all colours except dark or light;
from hearths within, a flame or two
spreads into brightness like a young girl’s hair
seen through white lace.

One house is empty.
Catholic family – they had only time
to pack a few things from the aching rooms
left when the pattern split and tore apart
as blackness came to edge the splintered windows
and glass shredded like paper on their floors.
Now sunshine or the curious can trace
outlines and silences – the house is filled
with unclaimed daylight.

The muttering kept me awake
three nights, then resolved itself
into a black wind –
catching the road off balance
slamming it into walls
freezing it scalding it lifting
the skin from the roof of its mouth.

Then it went quiet. I stood
at our back door. The wind
came whining into our yard –
a stray dog begging scraps.

Get out. I won’t feed you.
I’ve seen you snarling, worrying
clusters of dead newsprint
tossing them up till they catch
in the apple tree, its branches
like barbed wire skewering
sentences, faces.

I watch the pictures split
again and again, till nothing
is left but the eyes of the dead
glowing like tiny lights
in the wet November dusk.
I turn my back on the tree
half hoping half afraid
the black wind might blow them
away, but their reflections
In the glass pane of the door
keep burning steadily.

I will draw the curtains across
every window in the house
and every night for a month
the faintest of noises will wake me:
the wings of moths rustling,
or the doors of an Advent calendar
closing one by one.

The bomb exploded a mile and a half away
– our house twitched slightly, dust fell from the ceiling.
two men were murdered at the Cleansing Depot
– for days our street was full of bins not emptied.

Always the epicentre is somewhere else
– only the tremors reach us, gruesome, banal,
like the Red Hand of Ulster at Mount Stewart
gardens, set with tired geraniums.

It’s the hand I think of. The woman who lost two fingers
in the blast. She appeared in the paper, nameless,
ousted next day by more casualties, more dead.
Patched up by plastic surgery, Valium,

and prayer, will she pull her life together,
picking her way through a web of absences?
I start to notice people’s hands, as if
hers with its awkward gap – scars not yet healed –

is waiting for me. In the newsagent’s
she’s the one who can’t untie a knot
to lay out a stack of papers. She hands me change
cautiously; a coin rolls to the floor.

At lunchtime in the pub, she balances
a glass, but can’t quite manage knife and fork.
At the school gates she takes her children’s hands,
flinching as they touch where it’s still sore.

In church she kneels beside me at the rail,
holding her cupped hands to receive the wafer,
the fingers of one hand lightly cradling the other,
tilted slightly; trembling with the strain.

Everything she touches bears the print
of grief, bewilderment, courage. My own hands
ache in this bitter wind. My fingers itch
and then turn numb, as if they were already gone.

I stand on the pebbled shore at Rostrevor,
my back to the placid Edwardian villas
under Slieve Martin – its curled up forests
reflecting sleepily in the Lough.
the winter day sinks into a crescent
of light, between North and South.

Upstream of Warrenpoint
a black line leaves the map,
disintegrates to specks
drifting apart, dissolving,
sweeping down the narrows
to the sea.

Cold fills the North.
The clouds move briskly.
Carlingford Mountain
shrinks into itself
like a child expecting
a blow.

Something emerges from the grass behind it,
whimpering, shivering; wet fur clings in streaks
parting to show the skin, shifting and changing
shape, a pitiful trail scraped by the wind
moving across the hillside, innocent, lethal;
the scapegoat stumbles off into the dusk.

They gather in the street, their faces blanched
by TV lights, their hair streaked by the rain.

After the silent vigil they leave flowers
outside the bookie’s, heaped on the pavement and steps.

The steel shutter stays closed. There are children’s poems
cellotaped to it, with the names of the dead.

The wind dislodges the carefully placed bouquets.
rain seeps into the centre of each flower.

Carnations. Roses. Chrysanthemums. Steady rain
crushes the petals, turning their gloss to pulp.

When the bin men come, drowned petals and frayed stems
will go with the ash to be landfill in Belfast Lough.

For my mother

We shared the same skin, your touch
Home to my body. To grow up
I built walls, defining
Where you ended and I began.

It was a child sulking to shut
You out. You waited, a quiet
Stream for me to surface in.
That’s where to find you now –

Hunkered down on a river bank
Needle or pencil in hand, sometimes
Pins in your mouth, sometimes humming,
Or leant against some stubborn

Wind-spend tree. You showed me that
Obvious thing – that under the skin
There’s human, that dressing up is
A game fit only for children.

That obvious thing that nobody does –
You did it most times,
Shared your skin with so many,
I needed to know you loved

Me more than any old refugee.
I walled up inside, let my body
Go begging for crumbs like poor Tom,
A craving that couldn’t find centre.

But we shared the same skin
And when yours grew too tired
And too yellow to care –
With a child of my own but still

Not grown up, I couldn’t let go
Until prodigal waters burst
Mortar from brick, I broke through
To your salt-bedded river.

We share the same skin, my daughter
And me. She’s building walls
To define where I end
And she can make a beginning.

I come to place
In the palm of my hand
Where the road runs out
And there is nothing but rock.

Only my fingers,
Wrapped round the need
To pass through walls
Inside the heart
Can find an opening,
Let the stone roll.

No messiah,
White-skinned, red or black
Can lift me up from Wounded Knee.
I hold or I release my own Drumcree.

For Amy

Who is this urgent, longed-for creature
Tugging the milk from my body,
Who dreamed nine months in my inner sea
Tumbling, kicking, hiccupping
While cease-fires were declared
In the world that she will absorb
Like litmus paper?

Who can tell when the cord will be cut?
Wounds heal?
When recognition will blossom in a smile?
What the first new-coined words
Of a common tongue might be?

To gather a child up to your shoulder,
Cheek to your cheek,
Is to hazard the perilous gift of love
Into a no-man’s land.

For Anna

After you tore me, there was a clearing
Still as the moment of stillness after words,

Like coming upon a green space between trees
Out of the undertow of roots and creeper and growth in darkness
Face, limbs, feet, purpling, peeled raw.

Like this: your remarkable note
Rising to meet the blue above our heads,

Far beyond the clinical ceiling of this partitioned room
Beyond the unsolicited stab of pethidine in my thigh
Beyond the refusal to deliver you into my arms
Beyond blocked roads and minds,

You came out
Of my body
To claim your own

Your voice breaking over every fixed thing

Bearing me on its tide.

Men lead lives of quiet desperation
HD Thoreau

In this land
Where the law is like a public bar
With no toilet –
The men pissing out the back yard –
Women lead lives
Of even quieter desperation.

She smiles so wetly from the photograph.
Headlines next to Thatcher No Lame Duck
And Dubcek’s Human Face.

She wouldn’t spell her name right, five years bold.
Daddy’s savage lesson with a rule
And plastic tubing and his fists –

And still to come the kettle flex and plug.
He tipped her in the bath, he slapped her back
With salt, he beat her to a pulp.

She died of pain
And shock
And sheer exhaustion.

Daddy No Lame Duck
Sukina’s Human Face
Tomorrow someone else will take her place.

I am rinsing milk white mushrooms
Under the tap. Your mouth opens birdlike
To gulp all the world it can,

Incautious and whole.
A sliver of white in all that pink –
The first tooth is through.

A girl’s voice on the airwaves
Shocked by the hole
Where her sister’s cheek should be,

She can see right through to the teeth.
Thousands of splinters mosaic her child form,
This is the nuclear act embedded in flesh.

When she dies, her mother begs
Bury me with her.
Please, bury me with her.

I am watching skin peel like paint
Plants recoil into themselves
Seeking their own shadow.

Dust blooms with each step
As this wave burns us up,
But not to ashes.

Fifty years on
A girl’s voice on the airwaves
Fragments everything.

On the blank white space that is a mushroom
I visualise a mushroom field at dawn.
I drop one and it’s gone.

In memory of Ann Lovett and her sister

Once upon an evening after school
This young girl, neither ugly nor beautiful,
Slipped past the Church
To squat inside a grotto on the floor.
Hugging a bundle of baby clothes,
She laid them out beneath the Blessed Virgin’s chiselled feet
Before she bore a child with no man’s name.
Unlike that ancient tale of starlit stall
No creature shared her secret or her pain
And only when her body broke with shock
Someone stumbled on them in the dark.

Her father racing with blankets for them both,
Placing the stillborn child between two hot bottles all too late.
Carried to a car and then indoors,
She bled beside a weak, oil-burning stove
And slipped away once more without a word –
This time for good.
And everybody said We didn’t know.

Backs closed around the grave, tight-knit in grief.
New-formed and full-grown child
Are lowered with all eyes and loss of face –
Spread across a million breakfast tables.
No excuse,
Nothing to be salvaged but a heap of little clothes
Which will not go to waste.

Out here
In the eye of the storm
Needle-threading is
Art and survival.

By the sheltering glow
Of your fire,
I can’t even see
Needle’s eye.

We stab more than stitch
In rhyme more than rhythm
And nothing is sewn
Into one.

Sinking sun
Runs rivers of gold from my eyes,
My child born under a blanket
Of stars in a seamless sky.

I cry to go with my brother.
They leave me far behind,
Wait at the gate of Henderson’s field.
I am to walk across the pond,
A child Jesus on chill glass.
Arms cannot touch –
The high lift of my feet –
Skreak and craze – craze
All silver and faraway green.
No breathing nerves tightrope,
Ice warning of its substance
Skreak and craze – hard shoes
Laid down, footless.
Ice-girl, I see the weedy water
Glazed as through a cataract
My own eyes cast down frozen.

Ruby and Frank, after my mother died,
Took me on my bike to Mullahead.
Beside the Cusher River in the cattle hoof-marked
Ground, we ate strawberries.
Frank kissed Ruby and in the heat of mid-day
We ate strawberries and lay on our backs,
The two of them – the one of me,
I, finding a place next to them.
Round by Moyallon and Gilford
Singing without brakes downhill.
Tandragee, back to the wind – I don’t remember Tandragee,
Its castle, pink on sunset stone.
I don’t remember ever coming home.

I should have known after what he did
To the three hundred foxes
Sending them tail-tied, flaming,
Screeching through the wheat.

And that time outside Timnath,
He and his parents muttering of circumcision
Eating fistfuls of honey he said he had found
In the belly of the young lion
He had choked with his bare hands.

When I heard he’d been out slaughtering
A thousand Philistines, my people
With the jaw-bone of an ass,
I had to cut his glorious head of hair.

Journeying out in maps of all possible places
Brought you young and hopeful to our shore.

His long persuasive fingers under your armpits
Drawing your face towards intimate moss stitch:
Feet afloat on sphagnum gulping sudden fear:
Language leaving you, your throat tightening.

Scots pines, angry uncles impotent
In their yearning for the killing
Not to have been under their shelter.

Straggling summer flowers – honeysuckle, scabious, wild campion –
Incredulous cousins gaping and trembling.
Grasses sighing like distracted aunts.

Parent hills with the names of Knocklayd,
Carnanmore on them, linking
Arms in consolation in the glacial valley.
Pressing their sorrowing heads in cloud.

Far out on the bog in Erica and sundew
A cluster of huge stones
With the hunched shoulders of grave diggers.

Your body among deep green and russet
Lying like a drift of unseasonal snow.

And the sea’s untimely murmuring
Heilige nacht … Heilige nacht.

Lebanese boy in lighted khaki dancing
On planks; Cretan autumn moon
Swimming in fronds of tamarisk;
Boats wavering to the throb
Of underwater. Music fails.
The boy, vibrant as a young cedar,
Makes his feet move to a sound
Which is beyond us, at variance with sea,
Moment and movement, our breath
Stilled, fearing the endlessness; the end –
Comes down to the screak of wood
On the instant the music returns.

The Cretan town of Agia Galini sends a gift
For Yasser Arafat, a large mirror:
So that he may reflect on
A boy soldier dancing on turbulent water;
His own perturbed, unshaven face
Among the blue hand-painted perching doves.

for Stewart Parker

Walking musicians, sleeves rolled, lighting the place with music,
Moving to the unison of string and bow.
Sweets showered on the girl and boy
Parting the blocked streets of Platania.
Houses coloured like sugared almonds
Stuck on the edge of the mountain.

Precarious jubilation: I, a voyeur,
Trapped in the traffic, dulled and saddened by your dying,
Incredulous and privileged, witnessing
A procession circumambulating the same frieze
For hundreds and thousands of years.

You say, ‘Na sas zeisoun’ – ‘May they live for you’ –
To the parents of the bride and groom.
I searched my head for the sound,
Formed it on my tongue and palate.
A woman – turned eyes
Dark with recollecting and forgetting,
Recognition of a foreign body,
A solitary traveller –
Cut through ‘Na sas zeisoun’ with ‘Fuck you.’

You weren’t allowed to sing on Sunday afternoons
(not songs, I mean, only hymns from Sunday school)
In the dry dead halls of the house.
And the father went to sleep, and we tried to play,
Half-hearted, every whisper shushed.

This Sunday was rolling rain-clouds and heaving leaves,
And James did something bad.
The father came to us, like God personified,
And struck and struck the cowering child.
‘Please, please, dear Jesus, make him quit.’

By the stairs, a purple thunder sitting on the skylight,
And through the front-door glass, dark bride’s blossom
Beat like teachers’ canes against themselves.

‘Suffer little children …’ I croaked, not loud enough
For even me to hear,
And ran a race-pounding heart out of there, off home,
With God and God-men in every darkening hedge-hole,
Thrashing iron rods.

Forty years ago in brand-new sandals
Running sponge-soled and clumsy,
Wanting to walk with the music and being
Trapped between my aunt’s tight hand and the skin
Of a Lambeg drum;
Frayed cane beating on my solar plexus;
Stamen of orange lily; worn leather straps;
Bellying banner: nostrils clog
To the pulsing smell of other people’s flesh,
Mustiness of the inside of other people’s wardrobes.

No need for signposts
In a country crisscrossed
With trails of other journeys,
Winter sun at my back
Pushing me east.
I bless each familiar thing
And set my mind on constancy,
Telling myself stories we could become,
Re-inventing out history.
I was faithful, content,
Love made you articulate.
The fiction of what should have been
Is a map unfolding, a way home.

Having grown up with so many given negatives
I am always and constitutionally inclined to say yes
Yes let’s have another drink
Yes go on ahead
Yes of course you can
Yes I’ll try that
Yes why not
Yes have some of mine
Even when it might be more prudent to decline.

My brother is a lean white shadow in the early morning light,
Unspoken things
Have kept him thin, despite his wife’s attempts to fatten him
On love.

From the window I watch him walk his fields to their furthest edges,
Where the deer graze.
He has dug himself a place, refused to be the seed on stony ground

And with a farmer’s faith, he harvests himself against winter,
Each winnowing
Yielding the new history that he is planting in his children’s hearts.

You were the girl!
Free from family
And small town eyes,
You hit the city.
Parties, pints
In the Club Bar
Where you could pull
Any man you wanted –
And why not?
Sauce for the gander
And all that.
Many’s the one
Was set on fire
By the bright flame
Of your hair.

No big deal
You said,
But when you came back,
You scissored your hair
To a pool on the floor,
Swirling about your feet
Bright as fresh blood.

What ground is mine
If I would govern myself?
Where is my country
If neither bogs nor gantries
Speak of me?
Where can I stand
If I am not one thing,
Or the other?

My grandfather knew where he stood.
Ancestors planted his feet
In fertile soil, green futures were
Named in his name, possessed.
He preached their flinty faith
In mission tents, visions of eternal life
On soft Ulster evenings,

But there was no redemption.
Not in the land, or through the Blood.
Not in the hard lessons of duty, obedience,
With which he marked his children.

He is stripped of virtue,
His legacy a stone
Of no magic, no transcendence.
No children ever turn to swans,
Wafer remains wafer on the tongue,
And flesh is always flesh.

My two white birds will bring me
Water from the mountains,
Beakfuls of sweet sips.
I will grow a new tongue,
Paint my body with circles
And symbols of strength, mark myself
As one who belongs in the desert.

For Polly Devlin

‘Signatures of all things we read’;
In a blaze of identity
We scrawled our names,
Poets had plenty of paper.
Indicting the snow of space
In which, islanded,
The verses are
Black boxes in a white sea

Opened like a piano;
Da da da da da da da da da da da da da dee
That was poems,
And funny words like de la Mare
Sea, horse
(Drawing a chariot for the sea god).
The fancy stuff came later,
We had signed on.

White could not be white again
Nor could silence be commanded.
It was only a matter of time and loss
Before we took to the water.
Like dogs or horses yoked to retrieval
Who damn near choke before fetching up,
Frozen, heartscaled, on dry land.
The word out, the island seems like home.

There in the hill the snowman stood
Built tight against the invading hordes;
Blunt as a Dutchman in the Transvaal
Blindeyed and lonesome, a sentry for the King
Bound round his neck is a child’s orange scarf
He squints, mindless plaything of the tiny gods,
Icon for the neighbours who silently read in
His making a poor enough look-out.

I
Home Thoughts

Beyond the orange honeycomb of cars,
Old sows in bags, split plastic pipes,
We journeyed down and out from local bars
To fame and fortune, dispersing for dear life
The frequency of light, the tide of time
That rose so high in the lane back home.
We carved in water a dark and deep design;
A voyage of discovery, ourselves alone.

And always there’s an ample amber cave
With uisce beatha, hieroglyphics and a sage.
He speaks in riddles, blames full the knave
Of hearts and all the arts of birds in cages
Who gaze in mirrors to beat the band
Salvation coasting from a foreign land.

II
Kingdom Come

Titanic hammers whale out a back beat
For the Sandy Row Blues.
Down the docks they riveted big belled ships;
My father’s work is never done.

Locked in the metronome of lost time
Their ghosts quicken under the icy water
To stalk the empire with the Belfast curse;
We are the last of your faithful men

In the endless night they are swallowed whole;
As inside Ireland they drum against a balaena of bone
Tapping unheard, a morse code
Out of that monster they thought they’d come to break

III
In Memory of Patrick Kavanagh

At the townland’s edge sky is sea
Rising Ascension blue to lapis lazuli
Between inked atolls
Where men are not to be discovered.

We could have read had we not imagined
Would have rounded the globe had we not written
Stayed had we not permitted
Small miracles.

All summer housewives enlist aid
From listeners, suspecting they are not,
To fight the plague of spiders, flies and gnats.
As Atumn ripens like an English poems
Armies of wasps invade
Even the nice restaurants.
Circling like choppers round children’s ears
Freckled forearms sweep them off
But back they come, brazen with promise.

Women who took the boat in the last war
Sharp trained to treat casualties
Plan new bathrooms, overseas trips
Amidst the endless news of ceasefire
Their day near gone.
Their daughters near gone
From hearing the fall of their quick step
Across the sprank new kitchens
Well, welcome home.

Light explodes like a doodlebug
Above the shivering waves,
There is still an irish Sea
Between your plague and me
Between my love and me.

Returning late in rain from Connemara,
each time we pass a ‘Welcome to our County’
I slow and sound the horn, a single toot,

Galway toot Mayo toot Sligo…
and I’m explaining ‘Davy did this,
my first real boyfriend, twenty years ago.’

And when approaching sleep you call me sweetie,
I know your friend, your ex, still calls you that,
and later when you flex and click your knuckles

you will tell me of a lover, way back,
who’d twist and stretch so ardently
that each and every vertebra would crack.

And when you make me scratch
your back it’s childhood and your daddy;
the wheaten bread each Saturday’s my ma;

that thing when I touch the back
of your hand with the back of a hot
coffee spoon’s a man I loved abysmally

and that man’s granddad. And this is how it is:
angels and ogres jostle at our shoulders,
anxious for their chance to vanquish time,

and these fleeting appearances, toot, brief
visitations that make us scowl or smile, keep
all of our losses, even our dead, alive.

29 August 1998

I’ve jouked into a pub
to avoid the American woman
who’s been shooting sheep and shopkeepers all week.

Inverness
I’ve seen no monsters here.
The churches are deserted

but for tourists;
when the tall girl sang an Ave
for her boyfriend

- she hid behind a pillar -
it echoed so
I swore I heard an angel.

It’s Saturday.
It’s been two weeks.
A golden labrador’s cavorting in the river

chasing gulls - the grey ones
& the fatter ones with brown spots,
scalloped edges in the pattern on their wings,

tails opening and closing like Chinese fans.
The dog’s called Chance
I swear, I asked its owner -

a great pink tent of a woman with kids -
she tells me that the brownish gulls are youngsters
bigger than both their parents put together.

The woman with the cameras has gone -
I think I’ll travel back first class -
I should be on the train by three

asleep before Dunblane.
It’s lovely here
I had to get away.

I love the way they ask you
where you’re staying
meaning where you live

as if you have a choice.
I think again of leaving
till my face hurts

and I scrounge a cigarette.
In Irish the word for poem’s
the word for gift.

A Dog Called Chance was written on 29 August 1998, two weeks after the Omagh bomb which, on August 15th that year, killed 29 people including a woman pregnant with twins.

Postcard
Sunday 16th August 1998

It’s been the wettest summer here in years.
As suntans fade away and tourists leave,
we count the sun among the disappeared.

The seaside towns are stacked with souvenirs
that won’t sell now. And still we can’t believe
how bad it’s been, the worst we’ve had in years

—no notion of a ‘good day’ perseveres.
We give the nod to autumn for reprieve
and count our hopes among the disappeared.

In rain that is commensurate with tears
another generation learns to grieve.
On this, the hardest summer here in years,
we count the maimed. We name the disappeared.

Mock Orange
12th July 1998

As if it couldn’t bear the weight of itself
—as if it were a glass of milk gone sour—
the double-flowered Philadelphus
has suddenly reneged on summer.

The tight-clipped lawns and patios of Ulster
are littered with rescinded petals
in overlapping clumps, like piecemeal shrouds.

In Memoriam

If it’s over, let it be over,
how can we forget? We should not forget
the years that were rank with abscissions;
the days when our unuttered shame
was as stagnant as the cut flowers
blackening under cellophane;
the autumn when streets and townlands shrank
to funeral gatherings—as tightly concentric
as the petals of chrysanthemums;
the hopeless sense of everything falling away
except the leaves, the reddening leaves.

Out To Tender

Ceasefire, 1994

All along the motorway
they’re resurfacing and bridge-strengthening
and seeding the central reservation
with wild flowers.

But only an hour or so ahead
there is fierce growth in the ditches
and the road diminishes
to unmendable potholes.

And there are places where the light
suddenly drops; where the branches,
out of reach of the hedgecutter,
are irrevocably pleached.

***

The whole talk these days is about words;
the glitzy newly-honed nouns
—like peace and process and permanence.

But there are other things to be said
with reference to particular definitions
and in deference to the vernacular.

There are townlands where parameters
invariably decline to perimeters;
where you can’t be middle-of-the-road
when you’re the whole road.

Here come the cowboy landscapers
with their quick-fix Castlewellan Golds.
As an old Fermanagh woman would’ve said,
The same boys can do feats and shite wonders.

Whenever

Whenever you’ve been
the length and breadth
of the straight and narrow;
when you’re sick of clipped privet
and that couldn’t, wouldn’t, shouldn’t
old refrain of the garden shears

—you gotta break out delta-wise.
Rip out the hedges. Cultivate
a whole new rubric. Try Amaranthus,
Oriental poppies, Liquidambar ... And while you’re at it
practise saying possible, palpable, lingual
and other such vasodilatory words. Whenever.

(Dumb,
bloodied, the severed
head now chokes to
speak another tongue: -

As in
a long suppressed dream,
some stuttering garb-
led ordeal of my own)

An Irish
child weeps at school
repeating its English.
After each mistake

The master
gouges another mark
on the tally stick
hung about its neck

Like a bell
on a cow, a hobble
on a straying goat.
To slur and stumble

In shame
the altered syllables
of your own name;
to stray sadly home

and find
the turf cured width
of your parents’ heart
growing slowly alien:

In cabin
and field, the still
speak the old tongue.
You may greet no one.

To grow
a second tongue, as
harsh a humiliation
as twice to be born.

decades later
that child’s grandchild’s
speech stumbles over lost
syllables of an old order.

© John Montague, A Grafted Tongue, 1972, extract, Collected Poems, 1995, The Gallery Press.

Montague here suggests that the imposition of English on native Irish speakers has deprived them and their descendants of their natural way of being. He does not say this contributed to the Troubles but he describes it as part of the legacy of grievance.

Wie war das moglich?

That final newsreel of the war:
A welcoming party of almost shades
Met us at the cinema door
Clicking what remained of their heels.

From nests of bodies like hatching eggs
Flickered insectlike hands and legs
And rose an ululation, terrible, shy:
Children conjugating the verb ‘to die’.

One clamoured mutely of love
From a mouth like a burnt glove;
Others upheld hands bleak as begging bowls
Claiming the small change of our souls.

Some smiled at us as protectors.
Can these bones live?
Our parochial brand of innocence
Was all we had to give.

To be always at the periphery of incident
Gave my childhood its Irish dimension; drama of unevent:
yet doves of mercy, as doves of air,
Can falter here as anywhere.

That long dead Sunday in Armagh
I learned one meaning of total war
And went home to my Christian school
To kick a football through the air.

© John Montague, A Welcoming Party, 1993, complete text, Time In Armagh, 1993, The Gallery Press.

John Montague recalls how, as a schoolboy, he first saw footage of the Second World War death camps in Germany. In those days he saw such barbarism as remote but he has learned since that ‘doves of mercy, as doves of air,/Can falter here as anywhere.’

We match paces along the Hill Head Road,
the road to the old churchyard of Errigal Keerogue;
its early cross, a heavy stone hidden in grass.

As we climb, my old Protestant neighbour
signals landmarks along his well trodden path,
some hill or valley celebrated in local myth.

‘Yonder’s Whiskey Hollow,’ he declares,
indicating a line of lunar birches.
We halt to imagine men plotting

against the wind, feeding the fire or
smothering the fumes of an old fashioned worm
while the secret liquid bubbles and clears.

‘And that’s Foxhole Brae under there –’
pointing to the torn face of a quarry.
‘It used to be crawling with them.’

(A red quarry slinks through the heather,
a movement swift as a bird’s, melting as rain,
glimpsed behind a mound, disappears again.)

At Fairy Thorn Height the view fans out,
ruck and rise to where, swathed in mist
& rain, swells the mysterious saddle shape

of Knockmany Hill, its brooding tumulus
opening perspectives beyond our Christian myth.
‘On a clear day you can see far into Monaghan,’

old Eaglesone says, and we exchange sad notes
about the violence plaguing these parts;
last week, a gun battle outside Aughnacloy,

machine-gun fire splintering the wet thords,
two men beaten up near dark Altamuskin,
an attenpt to blow up Omagh Courthouse.

helicopters overhead, hovering locusts.
Heavily booted soldiers probing vehicles, streets,
their strange antennae bristling, like insects.

At his lane’s end, he turns to face me.
‘Tell them down South that old neighbours
can still speak to each other around here’

& gives me his hand, but not not ask me in.
Rain misting my coat, I turn back towards
the main road, where cars whip smartly past

between small farms, fading back into forest.
Soon all our shared landscape will be effaced,
a quick stubble of pine recovering most.

© John Montague, The Errigal Road, 1975, complete text, Collected Poems, 1995, The Gallery Press.

John Montague stresses the difficulty of relationships with old neighbours against a backdrop of routine violence.

i.m. Grandmother Hannah Carney

Hawk nose, snuff-stained apron;
I stand beside you again in
the gloom of your hallway
peering up & down Fintona’s
cattle-stained Main Street
some thronged fairday evening.

As you ramble on, like someone
sick or drunk, confessing to
a stranger in a bar, or train;
ignoring my small years, while
you spell out your restless pain,
mourn a tormented lifetime.

Frank, your pride, eldest boy,
interrogated again and again,
arrested in your warm kitchen,
bayonets and British voices
bullying him abruptly away
to the barbed wire, the tin

huts of Ballykinler, model
for Long Kesh, Magilligan.
Your youngest son, Tom, then
drills in the old bandroom
to follow him; soon lands
himself into the Curragh prison.

Released, your two internees
were met at the railway station,
cheered and chaired home
with a torchlight procession:
but one half of the town
held its blinds grimly down.

Still hatred and division
stain that narrow acre
from which you sprang.
A half century later
the same black dreams
return to plague your daughter,
their sister, my mother.

A Paisleyite meeting
blared outside her window.
A military helicopter
hovered over the hospital,
a maleficent spider. Her
dying nightmares were of her
sons seized by soldiers!

Across the rough, small hills
of your country girlhood –
the untamed territory of
the Barr, Brougher Mountain –
we brought your daughter home,
yellow car beams streaming;
a torchlight procession.

© John Montague, Procession, complete text, from A Flowering Absence, Section V of The Dead Kingdom 1984

John Montague depicts the divisions in families and communities during the Troubles.

The rifled honeycomb
of the high-rise hotel
where a wind tunnel moans.
While jungleclad troops
ransack the Falls, race
through huddled streets,
we lie awake, the wide
window washed with rain,
your oval face, and tide
of yellow hair luminous
as you turn to me again
seeking refuge as the
cave of night blooms
with fresh explosions.

© John Montague, Cave, 1975, complete text, Collected Poems, 1995, The Gallery Press.

John Montague’s simple poem describes two people in a hotel in Belfast listening to the trouble in the streets around the lower Falls Road, where soldiers are searching houses.

for Edna Longley

Paddy’s whole place was a clearing house:
A public phone in the hallway,
Folk huddled around a tiled fireplace.

But we were given tea in the front parlour,
Chill as the grave, a good place to talk,
Among brass trinkets, Long Kesh harps.

A patrol catwalks through the garden.
‘You can see how we are being protected,’
Paddy jokes, with a well-rehearsed laugh.

A single shot. ‘Jesus, that was close!’
The whole patrol crouches to the grass,
Though one slumps. ‘Your man’s hurt.

‘You don’t take cover with your rifle
between your legs, like starting to dive.
let’s way out and see if he’s alive.’

All the soldier barked was ‘Freeze!’
But Paddy led us to where he lay,
A chubby lad, only about eighteen,

That hangdog look, hair close-cropped,
Surplus of a crowding England, now
Dying in a puddle of wet and blood.

And still the soldier: ‘Don’t move!’
Paddy ran back in to fetch some linen.
‘Don’t touch him!’ He kneels down

To cover his skull gently, a broken egg.
‘When a man’s got, he’s a non-combatant,’
Paddy apologies, shepherding us inside.

An hour later, an army ambulance raced up,
An army doctor leaps down. Out playing
Again, the children chant: ‘Die, you bastard!’

Next morning, they checked out the area.
Someone had pruned an old tree in a garden,
Opening a new line of fire, instead.

© John Montague, Foreign Field, 1988, complete text, Collected Poems, 1995, The Gallery Press.

John Montague’s description of the reactions of people around the shooting of a soldier illustrates how humanity is curtailed by the routines of warfare.

Unmarked faces
fierce with grief

a line of children
led by a small coffin

the young
mourning the young

a sight beyond tears
beyond pious belief

David’s brethren
in the Land of Goliath.

© John Montague, Falls Funeral, 1975, complete text, Collected Poems, 1995, The Gallery Press.

John Montague describes a pitiable funeral in which children follow the coffin of a child. Many of the dead of the Troubles were young.

All around, shards of a lost tradition:
From the Rough Field I went to school
In the Glen of the Hazels. Close by
Was the bishopric of the Golden Stone;
The cairn of Carleton’s homesick poem.

Scattered over the hills, tribal
And place-names, uncultivated pearls.
No rock or ruin, dun or dolmen
But showed memory defying cruelty
Through an image-encrusted name.

The heathery gap where the Rapparee,
Shane Barnagh, saw his brother die –
On a summer’s day the dying sun
Satined its colours to crimson:
So breaks the heart, Brish-mo-Cree.

The whole landscape a manuscript
We had lost the skill to read,
A part of our past disinherited;
But fumbled, like a blind man,
Along the fingertips of instinct.

The last Gaelic speaker in the parish
When I stammered my school Irish
One Sunday after mass, crinkled
A rusty litany of phrase:
Tá an Ghaedilg againn arís …

Tír Eoghain: Land of Owen,
Province of the O’Niall;
The ghostly tread of O’Hagan’s
Barefoot gallowglasses marching
To merge forces in Dun Geanainn

Push southward to Kinsale!
Loudly the war-cry is swallowed
In swirls of black rain and fog
As Ulster’s pride, Elizabeth’s foemen,
Founder in a Munster bog.

© John Montague, complete text, from A Severed Head, Section IV of The Rough Field 1972, The Gallery Press

John Montague’s poem argues that we have lost a grasp on our history through no longer having the language that names the features of the landscape.

Riverbank, the long rigs
ending in broad docken
and a canopied pad
down to the ford
The garden mould
bruised easily, the shower
gathering in your heelmark
was the black O
in Broagh,
its low tattoo
among the windy boortrees
and rhubarb-blades
ended almost
suddenly, like the last
gh the strangers found
difficult to manage.

© Seamus Heaney, permissons Faber & Faber Ltd.

Seamus Heaney is connecting the native speech with the sounds of the locality to suggest why strangers don’t understand.

One morning early I met armoured cars
In convoy, warbling along on powerful tyres,
All camouflaged with broken alder branches,
And headphoned soldiers standing up in turrets.
How long were they approaching down my roads
As if they owned them? The whole country was sleeping.
I had rights-of-way, fields, cattle in my keeping,
Tractors hitched to buckrakes in open sheds,
Silos, chill gates, wet slates, the greens and reds
Of outhouse roofs. Whom should I run to tell
Among all of those with their back doors on the latch
For the bringer of bad news, that small-hours visitant
Who, by being expected, might be kept distant?
Sowers of seed, erectors of headstones…
O charioteers, above your dormant guns,
It stands here still, stands vibrant as you pass,
The visible, untoppled omphalos.

© Seamus Heaney, permissons Faber & Faber Ltd.

Seamus Heaney adopts the voice of a farmer annoyed that soldiers would come into his territory, assuming rights over it.

His bicycle stood at the window-sill,
The rubber cowl of a mud-splasher
Skirting the front mudguard,
Its fat black handlegrips

Heating in sunlight, the “spud”
Of the dynamo gleaming and cocked back,
The pedal treads hanging relieved
Of the boot of the law.

His cap was upside down
On the floor, next his chair.
The line of its pressure ran like a bevel
In his slightly sweating hair.

He had unstrapped
The heavy ledger, and my father
Was making tillage returns
In acres, roods, and perches.

Arithmetic and fear.
I sat staring at the polished holster
With its buttoned flap, the braid cord
Looped into the revolver butt.

“Any other root crops?
Mangolds? Marrowstems? Anything like that?”
“No.” But was there not a line
Of turnips where the seed ran out

In the potato field? I assumed
Small guilts and sat
Imagining the black hole in the barracks.
He stood up, shifted the baton-case

Further round on his belt,
Closed the domesday book,
Fitted his cap back with two hands,
And looked at me as he said goodbye.

A shadow bobbed in the window.
He was snapping the carrier spring
Over the ledger. His boot pushed off
And the bicycle ticked, ticked, ticked.

© Seamus Heaney, permissons Faber & Faber Ltd.

This poem by Heaney describes the uneasy relationship between Northern Ireland Catholics before the troubles and an armed police force.The ‘ticked,ticked ticked’ of the bicycle in the last line suggests an explosion about to happen, the eruption of violence out of these tense relationships.

I

Thigh deep in sedge and marigolds
a neighbour laid his shadow
on the stream, vouching

‘It’s poor as Lazarus, that ground,’
and brushed away
among the shaken leafage.

I lay where his lea sloped
to meet our fallow,
nested in moss and rushes,

my ear swallowing
his fabulous, biblical dismissal,
that tongue of chosen people.

When he would stand like that
on the other side, white-haired,
swinging his blackthorn

at the marsh weeds,
he prophesised above our scraggy acres,
then turned away

towards his promised furrows
on the hill, a wake of pollen
drifting to our bank, next season’s tares.

II

For days we would rehearse
each patriarchal dictum:
Lazarus, the Pharoah, Solomon

and David and Goliath rolled
magnificently, like loads of hay
too big for our small lanes,

or faltered on a rut -
“Your side of the house, I believe,
hardly rules by the book at all.”

His brain was a whitewashed kitchen
hung with texts, swept tidy
as the body o the kirk.

III

Then sometimes when the rosary was dragging
mournfully on in the kitchen
we would hear his step around the gable

though not until after the litany
would the knock come to the door
and the casual whistle strike up

on the doorstep. “A right-looking night,”
he might say, “I was dandering by
and says I, I might as well call.”

But now I stand behind him
in the dark yard, in the mourn of prayers.
He puts his hand in a pocket

or taps a little tune with the blackthorn
shyly, as if he were party to
lovemaking or a strangers weeping.

Should I slip away, I wonder,
or go up and touch his shoulder
and talk about the weather

or the price of grass-seed?

© Seamus Heaney, permissons Faber & Faber Ltd.

Seamus Heaney is exploring the tensions between the differing religious attitudes of neighbours.

As you plaited the harvest bow
You implicated the mellowed silence in you
In wheat that does not rust
But brightens as it tightens twist by twist
Into a knowable corona,
A throwaway love-knot of straw.

Hands that aged round ashplants and cane sticks
And lapped the spurs on a lifetime of game cocks
Harked to their gift and worked with fine intent
Until your fingers moved somnambulant:
I tell and finger it like braille,
Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable,

And if I spy into its golden loops
I see us walk between the railway slopes
Into an evening of long grass and midges,
Blue smoke straight up, old beds and ploughs in hedges,
An auction notice on an outhouse wall-
You with a harvest bow in your lapel,

Me with the fishing rod, already homesick
For the big lift of these evenings, as your stick
Whacking the tips off weeds and bushes
Beats out of time, and beats, but flushes
Nothing: that original townland
Still tongue-tied in the straw tied by your hand.

The end of art is peace
Could be the motto of this frail device
That I have pinned up on our deal dresser-
Like a drawn snare
Slipped lately by the spirit of the corn
Yet burnished by its passage, and still warm.

© Seamus Heaney, permissons Faber & Faber Ltd.

Seamus Heaney sees his childhood almost embodied in the harvest bow woven by his father and regards it as a work of art which celebrates - even brings - peace.

‘For Tom Flanagan’

I

Our guttural muse

was bulled long ago
by the alliterative tradition,
her uvula grows

vestigial, forgotten
like the coccyx
or a Brigid’s Cross
yellowing in some outhouse

while custom, that “most
sovereign mistress”,
beds us down into
the British isles.

II

We are to be proud
of our Elizabethan English:
“varsity”, for example,
is grass-roots stuff with us;

we “deem” or we “allow”
when we suppose
and some cherished archaisms
are correct Shakespearean.

Not to speak of the furled
consonants of lowlanders
shuttling obstinately
between bawn and mossland.

III

MacMorris, gallivanting
around the Globe, whinged
to courtier and groundling
who had heard tell of us

as going very bare
of learning, as wild hares,
as anatomies of death:
“What ish my nation?”

And sensibly, though so much
later, the wandering Bloom
replied, “Ireland,” said Bloom,
“I was born here. Ireland.”

© Seamus Heaney, permissons Faber & Faber Ltd.

Seamus Heaney reflects on how the Elizabethan English of Shakespeare is still spoken in rural Northern Ireland. This raises the question - which he ultimately dismisses - of whether he is Irish or British.

I

Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap.

In the flat country near by
Where they dug him out,
His last gruel of winter seeds
Caked in his stomach,

Naked except for
The cap, noose and girdle,
I will stand a long time.
Bridegroom to the goddess,

She tightened her torc on him
And opened her fen,
Those dark juices working
Him to a saint’s kept body,

Trove of the turfcutters’
Honeycombed workings.
Now his stained face
Reposes at Aarhus.

II

I could risk blasphemy,
Consecrate the cauldron bog
Our holy ground and pray
Him to make germinate

The scattered, ambushed
Flesh of labourers,
Stockinged corpses
Laid out in the farmyards,

Tell-tale skin and teeth
Flecking the sleepers
Of four young brothers, trailed
For miles along the lines.

III

Something of his sad freedom
As he rode the tumbril
Should come to me, driving,
Saying the names

Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard,
Watching the pointing hands
Of country people,
Not knowing their tongue.

Out here in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.

© Seamus Heaney, permissons Faber & Faber Ltd.

Semaus Heaney’s suggestion he will feel at home in Jutland, where the body of an executed man was found in the bog, resonates with the modern executions and burials in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

It is December in Wicklow:
Alders dripping, birches
Inheriting the last light,
The ash tree cold to look at.

A comet that was lost
Should be visible at sunset,
Those million tons of light
Like a glimmer of haws and rose-hips,

And I sometimes see a falling star.
If I could come on a meteorite!
Instead I walk through damp leaves,
Husks, the spent flukes of autumn,

Imagining a hero
On some muddy compound,
His gift like a slingstone
Whirled for the desperate.

How did I end up like this?
I often think of my friends’
Beautiful prismatic counseling
And the anvil brains of some who hate me

As I sit weighing and weighing
My responsible tristia.
For what? For the ear? For the people?
For what is said behind-backs?

Rain comes down through the alders,
Its low conductive voices
Mutter about let-downs and erosions
And yet each drop recalls

The diamond absolutes.
I am neither internee nor informer;
An inner émigré, grown long-haired
And thoughtful; a wood-kerne

Escaped from the massacre,
Taking protective colouring
From bole and bark, feeling
Every wind that blows;

Who, blowing up these sparks
For their meagre heat, have missed
The once-in-a-lifetime portent,
The comet’s pulsing rose.

© Seamus Heaney, permissons Faber & Faber Ltd.

Seamus Heaney here speaks of the experience of people who did not become passionately engaged in conflict, who did not feel locked into political in ideological certainties. He seems to be suggesting here that the missed portent might have given him greater reassurance that he was right to detach himself.

The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley -
No kitchens on the run, no striking camp -
We moved quick and sudden in our own country.
The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.
A people hardly marching - on the hike -
We found new tactics happening each day:
We’d cut through reins and rider with the pike
And stampede cattle into infantry,
Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.
Until, on Vinegar Hill, the fatal conclave.
Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.
The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.
They buried us without shroud or coffin
And in August the barley grew up out of the grave.

© Seamus Heaney, permissons Faber & Faber Ltd.

Seamus Heaney recalls the rebellion of 1798.

There, in the corner, staring at his drink.
The cap juts like a gantry’s crossbeam,
Cowling plated forehead and sledgehead jaw.
Speech is clamped in the lips’ vice.

That fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic-
Oh yes, that kind of thing could start again;
The only Roman collar he tolerates
Smiles all round his sleek pint of porter.

Mosaic imperatives bang home like rivets;
God is a foreman with certain definite views
Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure.
A factory horn will blare the Resurrection.

He sits, strong and blunt as a Celtic cross,
Clearly used to silence and an armchair:
Tonight the wife and children will be quiet
At slammed door and smoker’s cough in the hall.

© Seamus Heaney, permissons Faber & Faber Ltd.

Seamus Heaney describes the blunt bigotry of a Protestant shipyard worker and links the violence of sectarian prejudice to narrow and literal minded religious faith. He sees the same culture producing domestic violence too.

I

He would drink by himself
And raise a weathered thumb
Towards the high shelf,
Calling another rum
And blackcurrant, without
Having to raise his voice,
Or order a quick stout
By a lifting of the eyes
And a discreet dumb-show
Of pulling off the top;
At closing time would go
In waders and peaked cap
Into the showery dark,
A dole-kept breadwinner
But a natural for work.
I loved his whole manner,
Sure-footed but too sly,
His deadpan sidling tact,
His fisherman’s quick eye
And turned observant back.

Incomprehensible
To him, my other life.
Sometimes on the high stool,
Too busy with his knife
At a tobacco plug
And not meeting my eye,
In the pause after a slug
He mentioned poetry.
We would be on our own
And, always politic
And shy of condescension,
I would manage by some trick
To switch the talk to eels
Or lore of the horse and cart
Or the Provisionals.

But my tentative art
His turned back watches too:
He was blown to bits
Out drinking in a curfew
Others obeyed, three nights
After they shot dead
The thirteen men in Derry.
PARAS THIRTEEN, the walls said,
BOGSIDE NIL. That Wednesday
Everyone held
His breath and trembled.

II

It was a day of cold
Raw silence, wind-blown
Surplice and soutane:
Rained-on, flower-laden
Coffin after coffin
Seemed to float from the door
Of the packed cathedral
Like blossoms on slow water.
The common funeral
Unrolled its swaddling band,
Lapping, tightening
Till we were braced and bound
Like brothers in a ring.

But he would not be held
At home by his own crowd
Whatever threats were phoned,
Whatever black flags waved.
I see him as he turned
In that bombed offending place,
Remorse fused with terror
In his still knowable face,
His cornered outfaced stare
Blinding in the flash.

He had gone miles away
For he drank like a fish
Nightly, naturally
Swimming towards the lure
Of warm lit-up places,
The blurred mesh and murmur
Drifting among glasses
In the gregarious smoke.
How culpable was he
That last night when he broke
Our tribe’s complicity?
‘Now, you’re supposed to be
An educated man,’
I hear him say. ‘Puzzle me
The right answer to that one.’

III

I missed his funeral,
Those quiet walkers
And sideways talkers
Shoaling out of his lane
To the respectable
Purring of the hearse…
They move in equal pace
With the habitual
Slow consolation
Of a dawdling engine,
The line lifted, hand
Over fist, cold sunshine
On the water, the land
Banked under fog: that morning
I was taken in his boat,
The screw purling, turning
Indolent fathoms white,
I tasted freedom with him.
To get out early, haul
Steadily off the bottom,
Dispraise the catch, and smile
As you find a rhythm
Working you, slow mile by mile,
Into your proper haunt
Somewhere, well out, beyond…

Dawn-sniffing revenant,
Plodder through midnight rain,
Question me again.

© Seamus Heaney, permissons Faber & Faber Ltd.

Seamus Heaney recalls a neighbour who was killed in an explosion shortly after Bloody Sunday. He imagines the subtle conversation he might have had with the man about the community rules that would have confined him but perhaps saved him. He regrets that he had often turned the conversation away from talk of his poetry when he had met the man in bars.

I

To-night, a first movement, a pulse,
As if the rain in bogland gathered head
To slip and flood: a bog-burst,
A gash breaking open the ferny bed.
Your back is a firm line of eastern coast
And arms and legs are thrown
Beyond your gradual hills. I caress
The heaving province where our past has grown.
I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder
That you would neither cajole nor ignore.
Conquest is a lie. I grow older
Conceding your half-independant shore
Within whose borders now my legacy
Culminates inexorably.

II

And I am still imperially
Male, leaving you with pain,
The rending process in the colony,
The battering ram, the boom burst from within.
The act sprouted an obstinate fifth column
Whose stance is growing unilateral.
His heart beneath your heart is a war drum
Mustering force. His parasitical
And ignorant little fists already
Beat at your borders and I know they’re cocked
At me across the water. No treaty
I foresee will salve completely your tracked
And stretchmarked body, the big pain
That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again

© Seamus Heaney, permissons Faber & Faber Ltd.

Seamus Heaney is comparing his wife’s pregnancy to an imperial occupation that will spawn rebellion against him, perhaps an analogy with Ireland’s conquest by Britain and the growth of a community here which is estranged from the coloniser.

I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.

It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.

I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.

Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:

her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring

to store
the memories of love.
Little adultress,
before they punished you

you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,

I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur

of your brain’s exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles’ webbing
and all your numbered bones:

I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,

who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.

© Seamus Heaney, permissons Faber & Faber Ltd.

Seamus Heaney compares a bog body showing the marks of torture to the women tarred and feathered in Catholic communities for their relationships with soldiers and rebukes himself for failing to speak out in protest against such abuse.

“returning over the nightmare ground
we found the place again ...” Keith Douglas

TO THREE IRISH POETS

I

This, the twentieth day of March
In the first year of my middle age,
Sees me the father of a son:
Now let him in your minds sleep on
Lop-sided, underprivileged
And, out of his tight burrow edged.

Your godchild while you think of him
Or, if you can’t accept the term,
Don’t count the damage but instead
Wet, on me, the baby’s head:
About his ears our province reels
Pulsating like his fontanel,

And I, with you, when I baptise
Must Calculate, must improvise
The holy water and the font,
Anything else that he may want,
And, ‘priest of the muses’, mock the
Malevolent deus loci.

II

Now that the distant islands rise
Out of the corners of my eyes
And the imagination fills
Bog-meadow and surrounding hills,
I find myself addressing you
As though I’d always wanted to:

In order to take you all in
I’ve had to get beneath your skin,
To colonise you like a land,
To study each distinctive hand
And, by squatter’s rights, inhabit
The letters of its alphabet.

Although when I call him Daniel
(Mother and baby doing well),
Lost relations take their places,
Namesakes and receding faces:
Late travelers on the Underground
People my head like a ghost town.

III

Over the cobbles I recall
Cattle clattering to the North Wall
Till morning and the morning’s rain
Rinsed out the zig-zags of the brain,
Conducting excrement and fear
Along that lethal thoroughfare:

Now every lost bedraggled field
Like a mythopoeic bog unfolds
Its gelignite and dumdums:
And should the whole idea become
A vegetable run to seed in
Even our suburban garden,

We understudy for the hare’s
Disappearance around corners,
The approximate untold barks
Of the otters we call water-dogs -
A dim reflection of ourselves,
A muddy forepaw that dissolves.

IV

Blood on the kerbstones, and my mind
Dividing like a pavement,
Cracked by the weeds, by the green grass
That covers our necropolis,
The pity, terror ... What comes next
Is a lacuna in the text,

Only blots of ink concealing
Death or blackout as a reading:
For this, his birthday, must confound
Baedekers of the nightmare ground -
And room for him beneath the hedge
With succour, school and heritage

Is made tonight when I append
Each of your names and name a friend:
For yours, then, and the child’s sake
I who have heard the waters break
Claim this my country, though today
Timor mortis conturbat me.

TO JAMES SIMMONS

“We were distracted by too many things ...
the wine, the jokes, the music, fancy gowns.
We were no good as murderers, we were clowns.”

- Who stated with the Irish queer
A preference for girls to beer -
Here’s an attempt at telling all,
My confession unilateral:
Not that it matters for my part
Because I have your lines by heart,

Because the poetry you write
Is the flicker of a nightlight
Picking out where it is able
Objects on the dressing table,
Glancing through the great indoors
Where love and death debate the chores,

And where, beneath a breast, you see
The blue veins in filigree,
The dust in a glass of water,
In a discarded french letter
The millions acting out their last
Collaborations with the past.

Yes, to entertain your buddies
With such transcendental studies
Rather than harmonise with hams
In yards of penitential psalms
I count among your better turns:
Play your guitar while Derry burns,

Pipe us aboard the sinking ship
Two by two ... But before the trip
A pause, please, while the hundredth line
Squanders itself in facile rhyme -
A spry exposé of our game
But paradigmatic all the same

Like talking on as the twelfth chime
Ends nineteen hundred and ninety-nine,
The millennium and number:
For never milestones, but the camber
Dictates this journey till we tire
(So much for perning in a gyre!):

True to no ‘kindred points’, astride
No iridescent arc besides,
Each gives the other’s lines a twist
Over supper, dinner, breakfast
To make a sort of Moebius Band,
Eternal but quotidian ...

So, post me some octosyllabics
As redolent of death and sex
Or keep this for the rainy days
When, mindful of the final phase,
We diagnose it a relapse,
A metric following the steps

Of an ageing ballroom dancer
(Words a bow-tie round a cancer):
Or a reasonable way to move -
A Moonlight Saunter out to prove
That poetry, a tongue at play
With lip and tooth, is here to stay.

To exercise in metaphor
Our knockings at the basement door,
A ramrod mounted to invade
The vulva, Hade’s palisade,
The Gates of Horn and Ivory
Or the Walls of Londonderry.

TO DEREK MAHON

And did we come into our own
When, minus muse and lexicon,
We traced in August sixty-nine
Our imaginary Peace Line
Around the burnt-out houses of
The Catholics we’d scarcely loved,
Two Sisyphuses come to budge
The sticks and stones of an old grudge,

Two poetic conservatives
In the city of guns and long knives,
Our ears receiving then and there
The stereophonic nightmare
Of the Shankill and the Falls,
Our matches struck on crumbling walls
To light us as we moved at last
Through the back alleys of Belfast?

Why it mattered to have you here
You who journeyed to Inisheer
With me, years back, one Easter when
With MacIntyre and the lone Dane
Our footsteps lifted up the larks,
Echoing off those western rocks
And down that darkening arcade
Hung with the failures of our trade,

Will understand. We were tongue-tied
Companions of the island’s dead
In the graveyard among the dunes,
Eavesdroppers on conversations
With a Jesus who spoke Irish -
We were strangers in that parish,
Black tea with bacon and cabbage
For our sacraments and pottage,

Dank blankets making up our Lent
Till, islanders ourselves, we bent
Our knees and cut the watery sod
From the lazy-bed where slept a God
We couldn’t count among our friends,
Although we’d taken in our hands
Splinters of driftwood nailed and stuck
On the rim of the Atlantic.

That was Good Friday years ago -
How persistent the undertow
Slapped by currachs ferrying stones,
Moonlight glossing the confusions,
Of its each bilingual wave - yes,
We would have lingered there for less ...
Six islanders for a ten-bob note
Rowed us out to the anchored boat.

TO SEAMUS HEANEY

From Carrigskeewaun in Killadoon
I write, although I’ll see you soon,
Hoping this fortnight detonates
Your year in the United States,
Offering you by way of welcome
To the sick countries we call home
The mystical point at which I tire
Of Calor gas and a turf fire.

Till we talk again in Belfast
Pleasanter far to leave the past
Across three acres and two brooks
On holiday in a post box
Which dripping fuchsia bells surround,
Its back to the prevailing wind,
And where sanderlings from Iceland
Court the breakers, take my stand,

Disinfecting with a purer air
That small subconscious cottage where
The Irish poet slams his door
On slow-worm, toad and adder:
Beneath these racing skies it is
A tempting stance indeed - ipsis
Hibernicis hiberniores -
Except that we know the old stories,

The midden of cracked hurley sticks
Tied to recall the crucifix,
Of broken bones and lost scruples,
The blackened hearth, the blazing gable’s
Telltale cinder where we may
Scorch our shins until that day
We sleepwalk through a No Man’s Land
Lipreading to an Orange band.

Continually, therefore, we rehearse
Goodbyes to all our characters
And, since both would have it both ways,
On the oily roll of calmer seas
Launch coffin-ship and life-boat,
Body and soul thus kept afloat,
Mind open like a half door
To the speckled hill, the plovers’ shore.

So let it be the lapwing’s cry
That lodges in the throat as I
Raise its alarum from the mud,
Seeking for your sake to conclude
Ulster Poet our Union Title
And prolong this sad recital
By leaving careful footprints round
A wind-encircled burial mound.

Poem included with the permission of Michael Longley and his publisher Jonathan Cape

Michael Longley, on the occasion of the birth of his first son, writes to three poet friends. One theme at the heart of the poem is the concern that Ireland will be overshadowed by fear in the coming years.

Is it just like picking a lock
With the slow deliberation of a funeral,
Hesitating through a darkened nave
Until you find the answer?

Listening to the malevolent tick
Of its heart, can you read
The message of the threaded veins
Like print, its body’s chart?

The city is a map of the city,
Its forbidden areas changing daily.
I find myself in a crowded taxi
Making deviations from the known route,

Ending in a cul-de-sac
Where everyone breaks out suddenly
In whispers, noting the boarded windows,
The drawn blinds.

© Ciaran Carson, The Bomb Disposal, 1976, complete text, The New Estate and Other Poems, 1988, The Gallery Press.

Ciaran Carson compares the delicacy with which a bomb disposal officer works, adapting to the new mechanisms employed by bomb makers, with the way in which even people who live in Belfast have to update their understanding of where they are safe going.

Jerking his head spasmodically as he is penetrated by invisible gunfire,
The private wakes to a frieze of pull-outs from ‘Contact’ and ‘Men Only’.
Sellotape and Blu-Tack. The antiquated plumbing is stuttering that he
Is not in Balkan Street or Hooker Street, but in a bunk bed
In the Grand Central Hotel: a room that is a room knocked into other rooms.

But the whole Victorial creamy façade has been tossed off
To show the inner-city tubing: cables, sewers, a snarl of Portakabins,
Soft-porn shops and carry-outs. A Telstar Taxis depot that is a hole
In a breeze-block wall, a wire grille and a voice-box uttering gobbledegook.

© Ciaran Carson, Night Patrol, 1987, complete text, The Irish for No, 1987, The Gallery Press.

Ciaran Carson shows us the inner life of the soldier, expressed in the metaphor of the stripped hotel used as a billet.

The duck patrol is waddling down the odd-numbers side of Raglan Street,
The bass-ackwards private at the rear trying not to think of a third eye
Being drilled in the back of his head. Fifty-five. They stop. The head
Peers round, then leaps the gap of Balaclava Street. He waves the body over
One by one. Forty-nine. Cape Street. A gable wall. Garnet Street. A gable wall.

Frere Street. Forty-seven. Forty-five-and-a-half. Milan Street. A grocer’s shop.
They stop. They check their guns. Thirteen. Milton Street. An iron lamppost.
Number one. Ormond Street. ‘Two ducks in front of a duck and two ducks
behind a duck, how many ducks?’ Five? ‘No. Three.’ This is not the end.

© Ciaran Carson, Army, 1987, complete text, The Irish for No, 1987, The Gallery Press.

Ciaran Carson describes a British army foot patrol in the side streets off the Lower Falls Road in Belfast during the early Troubles. The poem seems to dwell on the mundane thoughts of a soldier who must be constantly alert to the danger of being shot.

Was it a vision or a waking dream? I heard her voice before I saw
What looked like the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, except Romeo
Seemed to have shinned up a pipe and was inside arguing with her. The casements
Were wide open and I could see some Japanese-style wall-hangings, the dangling
Quotation marks of a yin-yang mobile. ‘It’s got nothing’, she was snarling, ‘nothing
To do with politics’, and, before the bamboo curtain came down, ‘That goes for you too!’

It was time to turn into the dog’s-leg short-cut from Chlorine Gardens
Into Cloreen Park, where you might see an ‘Ulster Says No’ scrawled on the side
Of the power-block – which immediately reminds me of the Eglantine Inn
Just on the corner: on the missing ‘h’ of Cloreen, you might say. We were debating
Bacchus and the pards and me, how to render The Ulster Bank – ‘the Bank
That Likes to Say Yes’ into Irish, and whether eglantine was alien to Ireland.
‘I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,’ when ‘yes’ is the verb repeated,
Not exactly yes, but phatic nods and whispers. ‘The Bank That Answers All
Your Questions’, maybe? That Greek portico of Mourne granite, dazzling
With promises and feldspar, mirrors you in the Delphic black of its windows.

And the bruised pansies of the funeral parlour are dying in reversed gold letters.
The long sigh of the afternoon is not yet complete on the promontory where the victim,
A corporal in the UDR from Lisbellaw, was last seen having driven over half
Of Ulster, a legally-held gun was found and the incidence of stress came up
On the headland which shadows Larne Harbour and the black pitch of warehouses.
There is a melancholy blast of diesel, a puff of smoke which might be black or white.
So the harbour slips away to perilous seas as things remain unsolved we listen
To the ex cathedra of the fog-horn and ‘drink and leave the world unseen’ –

What’s all this to the Belfast business-man who drilled
Thirteen holes in his head with a Black & Decker? It was just a normal morning
When they came. The tennis-court shone with dew or frost, a little before dawn.
The border, it seemed, was not yet crossed: the Milky Way trailed snowy brambles,
The stars clustered thick as blackberries. They opened the door into the dark:
‘The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.’ Empty jam-jars.
Mish-mash. Hotch-potch. And now you rub your eyes and get acquainted with the light
A dust of something reminiscent drowses over the garage smell of creosote,
The concrete: blue clouds in porcelain, a paint-brush steeped in a chipped cup
Staples hyphenate a wet cardboard box as the upturned can of oil still spills
And the unfed cat toys with the yin-yang of a tennis-ball, debating whether ‘yes’ is ‘no’.

© Ciaran Carson, The Irish for No, 1987, complete text,The Irish for No, 1987, The Gallery Press.

Ciaran Carson references here the Unionist opposition to the Anglo Irish Agreement of 1985, expressed in the slogan Ulster Says No, and the occasional stories of members of the security forces killing themselves with their own guns.

Suddenly as the riot squad moved in, it was raining exclamation marks,
Nuts, bolts, nails, car-keys. A fount of broken type. And the explosion
Itself – an asterisk on the map. This hyphenated line, a burst of rapid fire …
I was trying to complete a sentence in my head, but it kept stuttering,
All the alleyways and side-streets blocked with stops and colons.

I know this labyrinth so well – Balaclava, Raglan, Inkerman, Odessa Street –
Why can’t I escape? Every move is punctuated. Crimea Street. Dead end again.
A Saracen, Kremlin-2 mesh. Makrolon face-shields. Walkie-talkies. What is
My name? Where am I coming from? Where am I going? A fusillade of question-marks.

© Ciaran Carson, Belfast Confetti, 1987, complete text,The Irish for No, 1987,The Gallery Press.

Ciaran Carson finds himself displaced in a world once familiar, in which rioters and soldiers confront each other not just with their separate technologies of combat but with dazzling new vocabularies. Turning from the rioters he finds himself questioned by soldiers about his movements and finds one barrier to his progress as irksome as the other.

Squeeze the buzzer on the steel mesh gate like a trigger, but
It’s someone else who has you in their sights. Click. It opens. Like electronic
Russian roulette, since you never know for sure who’d who, or what
You’re walking into. I, for instance, could be anybody. Though I’m told
Taig’s written on my face. See me, would I trust appearances?

Inside a sudden lull. The barman lolls his head at us. We order Harp –
Seems safe enough, everybody drinks it. As someone looks daggers at us
From the Bushmills mirror, a penny drops: how simple it would be for someone
Like ourselves to walk in and blow the whole place, and ourselves, to Kingdom Come.

© Ciaran Carson, Last Orders, 1989, complete text, Belfast Confetti, 1989, The Gallery Press.

Ciaran Carson’s poem recalls the days when pubs were bombed or attacked by gunmen and going out for a drink carried a risk. He describes the security gates which many pubs had installed at their entrances.

They had questioned him for hours. Who exactly was he? And when
he told them, they questioned him again. When they accepted who he was, as
Someone not involved, they pulled out his fingernails. Then
They took him to a waste ground somewhere near the Horseshow Bend, and told him
What he was. They shot him nine times.

A dark umbilicus of smoke was rising from a heap of burning tyres.
The bad smell he smelt was the smell of himself. Broken glass and knotted Durex.
The knuckles of a face in a nylon stocking. I used to see him in the Gladstone Bar,
drawing pints for strangers, his almost-perfect fingers flecked with scum.

© Ciaran Carson, Campaign, 1987, complete text, The Irish for No, 1987, The Gallery Press.

Ciaran Carson reflects on one of the victims of the many sectarian murders by Loyalists of randomly chosen Catholics.

There was this head had this mouth he kept shooting off. Unfortunately.
It could have been worse for us than it was for him. Provisionally.
But since nothing in this world is certain and you don’t know who hears what
We thought it was time he bit off more than he could chew. Literally.
By the time he is found there’ll be nothing much left to tell who he was.

But of course some clever dick from the ‘Forscenic Lab’ reconstructs
Him, what he used to be – not from his actual teeth, not fingerprints,
But from the core – the toothmarks of the first and last bite he’d taken of
This sour apple. But then we would have told them anyway. Publicity.

© Ciaran Carson, The Mouth, 1989, complete text, Belfast Confetti, 1989, The Gallery Press.

Ciaran Carson adopts the cynical voice of an IRA killer describing how he dealt with an informer.

A white dot flicked back and forth across the bay window: not
A table- tennis ball, but ‘ping-pong,’ since this is happening in another era,
The extended leaves of the dining table - scratched mahogany veneer -
Suggesting many such encounters, or time passing: the celluloid diminuendo
As it bounces off into a corner and ticks to an incorrigible stop.
I pick it up days later, trying to get that pallor right: it’s neither ivory
Nor milk. Chalk is better and there’s a hint of pearl, translucent
Lurking just behind opaque. I broke open the husk so many times
And always found it empty the pith was a wordless bubble.

Though there’s nothing in the thing itself, bits of it come back unbidden,
Playing in the archaic dust till the white blip became visible.
Just as, the other day, I felt the tacky pimples of a ping- pong bat
When the bank-clerk counted my money with her rubber thimble, and knew
The black was bleeding into red. Her face was snow and roses just behind
The bullet-proof glass: I couldn’t touch her if I tried. I crumpled up the chit-
No use in keeping what you haven’t got-and took a stroll to Ross’s auction.

There was this Thirties scuffed leather sofa I wanted to make a bid for.
Gestures, prices: soundlessly collateral in the murmuring room.

I won’t say what I paid for it: anything’s too much when you have nothing.
But in the dark recesses underneath the cushions I found myself kneeling
As decades of the Rosary dragged by, the slack of years ago hauled up
Bead by bead and with them, all the haberdashery of loss - cuff buttons,
Broken ball-point pens and fluff, old pennies, pins and needles, and yes,
A ping-pong ball. I cupped it in my hands like a crystal, seeing not
The future, but a shadowed parlour just before the blinds are drawn.
Someone
Has put up two trestles. Handshakes all round, nods and whispers.
Roses are brought in, and suddenly, white confetti seethes against the window.

Ciaran Carson, Snow, 1989, complete text, Belfast Confetti, 1989, The Gallery Press.

Ciaran Carson’s snow takes an image of a ping-pong ball and draws remarkable nostalgic associations out of it.

Your man, says the Man, will walk into the bar like this — here his fingers
Mimic a pair of legs, one stiff at the knee — so you’ll know exactly
What to do. He sticks a finger to his head. Pretend it’s child’s play —
The hand might be a horse’s mouth, a rabbit or a dog. Five handclaps.
Walls have ears: the shadows you throw are the shadows you try to throw off.

I snuffed out the candle between finger and thumb. Was it the left hand
Hacked off at the wrist and thrown to the shores of Ulster? Did Ulster
Exist? Or the Right Hand of God, saying Stop to this and No to that?
My thumb is the hammer of a gun. The thumb goes up. The thumb goes down.

© Ciaran Carson, Bloody Hand, 1989, complete text, Belfast Confetti, 1989, The Gallery Press.

Ciaran Carson appears to be speculating on the significance of symbolic gestures, perhaps even telling us that we use them too freely without knowing what they mean.
The Red Hand of the poem is one that features in flags and shields representing Ulster.

Bombing at about ninety miles an hour with the exhaust skittering
The skid-marked pitted tarmac of Kennedy Way, they hit the ramp and sailed
Clean over the red-and-white guillotine of the check-point and landed
On the M1 flyover, then disappeared before the Brits knew what hit them. So
The story went: we were in the Whip and Saddle bar of the Europa.

There was talk of someone who was shot nine times and lived, and someone else
Had the inside info on the Romper Room. We were trying to remember the facts
behind the Black & Decker case, when someone ordered another drink and we entered
The realm of Jabberwocks and Angels’ Wings, Widows’ Kisses, Corpse Revivers.

© Ciaran Carson, 1987, complete text, The Irish for No, 1987, The Gallery Press.

Ciaran Carson reproduces the glibness of journalists in Belfast taking in the news of a shooting incident and then telling tales about earlier atrocities before getting drunk.

It could have been or might have been. Everything Provisional and Sticky,
Daily splits and splinters at the top of a hat or a principle –
The right hand wouldn’t even know if it was the right hand some would claim it
As the left. If only this, if only that, if only pigs could fly.
Someone decides, hawk or dove. Ambushes are sprung. velvet fist. Iron glove.

It was on the stroke of midnight by the luminous dial of the clock
When this woman, caught in crossfire, stooped for the dashboard cigarette lighter.
In that instant, a bullet neatly parted her permanent wave. So now
She tells the story, how a cigarette made all the odds. between life. And death.

© Ciaran Carson, Hairline Crack, 1989, complete text, Belfast Confetti, 1989, The Gallery Press.

Ciaran Carson recalls the ideological disputes between paramilitary factions. The word Provisional in the first line refers to the Provisional IRA and Sticky refers to the more left wing Official IRA.

At four in the morning he wakes
to the yawn of brakes,
the snore of a diesel engine.
Gone. All she left
is a froth of bra and panties.
The scum of the Seine
and the Farset.
Gallogly squats in his own pelt.
A sodium street light
has brought a new dimension
to their black taxi.
By the time they force an entry
he’ll have skedaddled
among hen runs and pigeon lofts.

The charter flight from Florida
touched down at Aldergrove
minutes earlier,
at 3.54 am.
Its excess baggage takes the form
of Mangas Jones, Enquire,
who is, as it turns out, Apache.
He carries only hand luggage.
“Anything to declare?”
He opens the powder-blue attaché -
case. “A pebble of quartz.”
“You’re an Apache?” “Mescalero.”
He follows the corridor’s
arroyo til the signs read Hertz.

He is going to put his foot down
on a patch of waste ground
along the Stranmillis embankment
when he gets wind
of their impromptu fire.
The air above the once-sweet stream
is aquarium -
drained.
And six, maybe seven, skinheads
have formed a quorum
round a burnt-out heavy duty tyre.
So intent on sniffing glue
they may not notice Gallogly,
or, if they do, are so far gone.

Three miles west as the crow flies
an all-night carry-out
provides the cover
for an illegal drinking club.
While the bar man unpacks a crate
of Coca-cola,
one cool customer
takes on all comers in a video game.
He grasps what his two acolytes
have failed to seize.
Don’t they know what kind of take-away
this is, the glipes?
Vietnamese. Viet-ma-friggin’-knees.
He drops his payload of napalm.

Gallogly is wearing a candy-stripe
king-size sheet,
a little something he picked up
off a clothes line.
He is driving a milk van
he borrowed from the Belfast Co-op
while the milkman’s back
was turned.
He had given the milkman a playful
rabbit punch.
When he stepped on the gas
he flooded the street
with broken glass.
He is trying to keep a low profile.

The unmarked police car draws level
with his last address.
A sergeant and eight constables
pile out of a tender
and hammer up the stairs.
The street bristles with static.
Their sniffer dog, a Labrador bitch,
bursts into the attic
like David Balfour in Kidnapped.
A constable on his first dawn swoop
leans on a shovel.
He has turned over a
new leaf in her ladyship’s herb patch.
They’ll take it back for analysis.

All a bit much for a night shift
to meet a milkman
who’s double-parked his van
closing your front door after him.
He’s sporting your
Donegal tweed suit and your
Sunday shoes and politely raises your
hat as he goes by.
You stand there with your mouth open
as he climbs into the still-warm
driving seat of your Cortina
and screeches off towards the motorway,
leaving you uncertain
of your still-warm wife’s damp tuft.

Someone on their way to early Mass
will find her hog-tied
to the chapel gates -
O Child of Prague -
big-eyed, anorexic.
The lesson for today
is pinned to her bomber jacket.
It seems to read Keep off the Grass.
Her lovely head has been chopped
and changed.
For Beatrice, whose fathers
knew Louis Quinze,
to have come to this, her perruque
of tar and feathers.

He is pushing the maroon Cortina
through the sedge
on the banks of the Callan.
It took him a mere forty minutes
to skite up the M1.
He followed the exit sign
for Loughgall and hatred
among the top-heavy apple orchards.
This stretch of the Armagh/Tyrone
border was planted by Warwickshiremen
who planted in turn
their familiar quick-set damson hedges.
The Cortina goes to the bottom.
Gallogly swallows a plummy-plum-plum.

“I’ll warrant them’s the very pair
o’ boys I seen abroad
in McParland’s bottom, through where
in under God -
for thou art so possessed with murd’rous hate -
where they come from only God knows.”
“They were mad for a bite o’ mate,
I s’pose.”
“I doubt so. I come across a brave dale
o’ half-chawed damsels. Wanst wun disappeared
I follied the wun as yelly as Indy male.”
“Ye weren’t afeared?”
“I follied him.” “God save us.”
“An’ he driv away in a van belongin’ t’ Avis.”

The grass sprightly as Astroturf
in the September frost
and a mist
here where the ground is low.
He seizes his own wrist
as if, as if
Blind Pew again seized Jim
as the sign of the “Admiral Benbow”.
As if Jim Hawkins led Blind Pew
to Billy Bones
and they were all one and the same,
he stares in disbelief
at an Aspirin-white spot he pressed
into his own palm.

Gallogly’s thorn-proof tweed jacket
is now several sizes too big.
He has flopped
down in a hay shed
to ram a wad of hay into the toe
of each of his ill-fitting
brogues, when he gets the drift
of ham and eggs.
Now he’s led by his own wet nose
to the hacienda-style
farmhouse, a baggy-kneed animated
bear drawn out of the woods
by an apple pie
left to cool on a windowsill.

She was standing at the picture window
with a glass of water
and a Valium
when she caught your man
in the reflection on her face.
He came
shaping past the milking parlour
as if he owned the place.
Such is the integrity
of their quarrel
that she immediately took down
the legally held shotgun
and let him have both barrels.
She had only wanted to clean the air.

Half a mile away across the valley
her husband’s UDR patrol
is mounting a check-point.
he pricks up his ears
at the crack
of her prematurely arthritic hip-
joint,
and commandeers one of the jeeps.
There now, only a powder burn
as if her mascara had run.
The bloody puddle
in the yard, and the shilly-shally
of blood like a command wire
petering out behind a milk churn.

A hole in the heart, and ovarian cyst.
Coming up the Bann
in a bubble.
Disappearing up his own bum.
Or, running on the spot
with all the aplomb
of a trick-cyclist.
So thin, side-on, you could spit
through him.
His six foot of pump water
bent double
in agony or laughter.
Keeping down-wind of everything.

White Annetts. Gillyflowers. Angel Bites.
When he names the forgotton names
of apples
he has them all off pat.
His eye like an eye of a traveling rat
lights on the studied negligence
of these scraws of turf.
A tarpaulin. A waterlogged pit.
He will take stock of the Kalashnikov’s
filed-down serial number,
seven sticks of unstable
commercial gelignite
that have already begun to weep.
Red strokes. Sugar Sweet, Widows’ Whelps.

Buy him a drink and he’ll regale you
with how him came in for a cure
one morning after the night before
to the Las Vegas Lounge and Cabaret.
He was crossing the bar’s
eternity of parquet floor
when his eagle eye
saw something move on the horizon.
If it wasn’t an Indian.
A Sioux. An ugly Sioux.
He means, of course, an Oglala
Sioux busily tracing the family tree
of an Ulsterman who had some hand
in the massacre at Wounded Knee.

He will answer the hedge-sparrow’s
Littlebitofbreadandnocheese
with a whole bunch
of freshly picked watercress,
a bulb of garlic,
sorrel,
with many faceted blackberries.
Gallogly is out to lunch.
When his cock rattles its sabre
he takes it in his dab
hand, plants one chaste kiss
on its forelock,
and then, with a birl and a skirl,
tosses it off like a caber.

The UDR corporal had come off duty
to be with his wife
while the others set about
a follow-up search.
When he tramped out just before twelve
to exercise the greyhound
he was hit by a high-velocity
shot.
You could, if you like, put your fist
in the exit would
in his chest.
He slumps
in the spume of his own arterial blood
like an overturned paraffin lamp.

Gallogly lies down in the sheugh
to munch
through a Beauty of
Bath. He repeats himself, Bath,
under his garlic-breath.
Sheugh, he says. Sheugh.
He is finding that first ‘sh’
increasingly difficult to manage.
Sh-leeps. A milkmaid sinks
her bare foot
to the ankle
in a simmering dung hill
and fills the slot
with beastlings for him to drink.

In Ovid’s conspicuously tongue-in-cheek
account of an eyeball
to eyeball
between the goddess Leto
and a shower of Lycian reed cutters
who refuse her a cup of cloudy water
from their churned-up lake,
Live then forever in that lake of yours,
she cries, and has them
bubble
and squeak
and plonk themselves down as bullfrogs
in their icy jissom.

A country man kneels on his cap
beside this neighbour’s fresh
grave-mud
as Gallogly kneels to lap
the primrose-yellow
custard.
The knees of his hand-me-down duds
are gingerish.
A pernickerty seven-
year-old girl-child
parades in her mother’s trousseau
and mumbles a primrose
Kleenex tissue
to make sure her lipstick’s even.

Gallogly has only to part the veil
of its stomach wall
to get right under the skin,
the spluttering heart
and collapsed lung,
of the horse in Guernica.
He flees the Museum of Modern Art
with its bit between his teeth.
When he began to cough
blood, Hamsun rode the Minneapolis/
New York night train
on top of the dining car.
One long, inward howl.
A porter-drinker without a thrapple.

A weekend trip to the mountains
North of Boston
with Alice, Alice A.
and her paprika hair,
the ignition key
to her family’s Winnebago camper,
her quim
biting the leg off her.
In the oyster bar
of Grand Central Station
she gobbles a dozen Chesapeakes -
‘Oh, I’m not particular as to size’ -
and, with a flourish of tabasco,
turns to gobble him.

A brewery lorry on a routine delivery
is taking a slow,
dangerous bend.
The driver’s blethering
his code name
over the Citizens’ Band
when someone ambles
in front of him. Go Johnny, Go, Go, Go.
He’s been dry-gulched
by a sixteen-year-old numb
with Mogadon,
whose face is masked by the seamless
black stocking filched
from his mum.

When who should walk in but Beatrice,
large as life, or larger,
sipping her one glass of lager
and singing her one song.
If he had it to do all over again
he would let her shave his head
in memory of ‘98
and her own, the French, Revolution.
The son of the King of the Moy
met this child on the Roxborough
estate. Noblesse, she said. Noblesse
oblige. And her tiny nipples
were bruise-bluish, wild raspberries.
The song she sang as ‘The Croppy Boy’.

Her grand’mére was once asked to tea
by Gertrude Stein,
and her grand’mére and Gertrude
and Alice B., chére Alice B.
with her hook-nose,
the three of them sat in the nude
round the petits fours
and repeated Eros is Eros is Eros.
If he had it to do all over again
he would still be taken in
by her Alice B Toklas
Nameless Cookies
and those new words she had him learn:
hash, hashish, lo perfido assassin.

Once the local councilor straps
himself into the safety belt
of his Citroen
and skids up the ramp
from the municipal car park
he upsets the delicate balance
of a mercury-tilt
boobytrap.
Once they collect his smithereens
he doesn’t quite add up.
They’re shy of a foot, and a calf
which stems
from his left shoe like a severely
pruned-back shrub.

Ten years before. The smooth-as-a-
front-lawn at Queen’s
where she squats
before a psilocybin god.
The indomitable gentle-bush
that had Lanyon or Lynn
revise their elegant ground plan
for the university quad.
With calmness, with care,
with breast milk, with dew.
There’s no cure now.
There’s nothing left to do.
The mushrooms speak through her.
Hush-hush.

‘Oh, I’m not particular as to size,’
Alice hastily replied
and broke off a bit of the edge
with each hand
and set to work very carefully,
nibbling
first at one
and then the other.
On the Staten Island Ferry
two men are dickering
over the price
of a shipment of Armalites,
as Henry Thoreau was wont to quibble
with Ralph Waldo Emerson.

That last night in the Algonquin
he met with a flurry of sprites,
the assorted shades
of Wolfe Tone, Napper Tandy,
a sanguine
Michael Cusack
brandishing his blackthorn.
Then, Thomas Meagher
darts up from the Missouri
on a ray
of the morning star
to fiercely ask
what has become of Irish hurling.

Everyone has heard the story of
a strong and beautiful bug
which came out of the dry leaf
of an old table of apple-tree wood
then stood
in a farmer’s kitchen in Massachusetts
and which was heard gnawing out
for several weeks -
When the phone trills
he is careful not to lose his page -
Who knows what beautiful and winged life
whose egg
has been buried for ages
may unexpectedly come forth? ‘Tell-tale.’

Gallogly carries a hunting bow
equipped
with a bow sight
and a quiver
of hunting arrows
belonging to her brother.
Alice has gone a little way off
to do her job.
A timber wolf,
a caribou,
or merely a trick of the light?
As, listlessly,
he lobs
an arrow into the undergrowth.

Had you followed the river Callan’s
Pelorus Jack
through the worst drought
in living memory
to the rains of early Autumn
when it scrubs its swollen,
scab-encrusted back
under a bridge, the bridge you look down from,
you would be unlikely to pay much heed
to yet another old banger
no one could be bothered to tax,
or a beat-up fridge
well-stocked with gelignite,
or some five hundred yards of Cortex.

he lopes after the dribs of blood
through the pine forest
till they stop dead
in the ruins of a longhouse
or hogan.
Somehow, he finds his way
back to their tent.
Not so much as a whiff of her musk.
The girl behind Aer Lingus
check-in desk
at Logan
is wearing the same scent
and an embroidered capital letter A
on her breast.

Was she Aurora, or the goddess Flora,
Artemidora, Venus bright,
or Helen fair beyond compare
that Priam stole from the Grecian sight?
Quite modestly she answered me
and she gave her head one fetch up
and she said I am gathering musheroons
to make my mammy ketchup.
The dunt and dunder
of a culvert-bomb
wakes him
as it might have woke Leander.
And she said I am gathering musheroons
to make my mammy ketchup O.

Predictable as the gift of the gab
or a drop of the craythur
he noses round the six foot deep
crater.
Oblivious to their Landrover’s
olive-drab
and the Burgundy berets
of a snatch-squad of Paratroopers.
Gallogly, or Gollogly,
otherwise known as Golightly,
otherwise known as Ingoldsby,
otherwise known as English,
gives forth one low cry of anguish
and agrees to come quietly.

They have bundled him into the cell
for a strip-
search.
He perches
on the balls of his toes, my my,
with his legs spread
till both his instep arches
fall.
he holds himself at arm’s
length from the brilliantly Snowcem-ed
wall, a game bird
hung by its pinion tips
till it drops, in the fullness of time,
from the mast its colours are nailed to.

They have left him to cool his heels
after the obligatory
bath,
the mug shots, fingerprints
et cetera.
He plumps the thin bolster
and hints
at the slop bucket.
Six o’clock.
From the A Wing of Armagh jail
he can make out
the Angelus bell
of St Patrick’s cathedral
and a chorus of “For God and Ulster”.

The brewery lorry’s stood at a list
by the Las Vegas
throughout the afternoon,
its off-side rear tyres down.
As yet, no one has looked agog
at the smuts and rusts
of a girlie mag
in disarray on the passenger seat.
An almost invisible, taut
fishing line
runs from the Playmate’s navel
to a pivotal
beer keg.
As yet, no one has risen to the bait.

I saw no mountains, no enormous spaces,
no magical growth and metamorphosis
of buildings, nothing remotely like
a drama or a parable
in which he dons these lime-green
dungarees,
green Wellingtons,
a green helmet of aspect terrible.
The other world to which mescalin
admitted me was note the world of visions;
it existed out there, in what I could see
with my eyes open.
He straps a chemical pack on his back
and goes in search of some Gawain.

Gallogly pads along the block
to raise his visor
at the first peep-hole.
He shamelessly
takes in her lean piglet’s
back, the back
and boyish hams
of a girl at stool.
At last. A tiny goat’s-pill.
A stub of crayon
with which she has squiggled
a shamrock after the school
of Pollock, Jackson Pollock.

I stopped and stared at her face to face
and on the spot a name came to me,
a name with smooth, nervous sound:
Ylayali.
When she was very close
I drew myself up straight
and said in an impressive voice
‘Miss, you are losing your book.’
And Beatrice, for it is she, she squints
through the spy-hole
to pass him an orange,
an Outspan orange some visitor has spiked
with a syringe-ful
of vodka.

The more a man has, the more a man wants,
the same I don’t think is true.
For I never met a man with one black eye
who ever wanted two.
In the Las Vegas Lounge and Cabaret
the resident group -
pot bellies, Aran knits -
have you eating out of their hands.
Never throw a brick at a drowning man
when you’re near to a grocer’s store.
Just throw him a cake of Sunlight soap,
let him wash himself ashore.
You will act the galoot, and gallivant,
and call for another encore.

Gallogly, Gallogly, O Gallogly
juggles
his name like an orange
between his outsize baseball glove
paws,
and ogles
a moon that’s just out of range
beyond the perimeter wall.
He works a gobbet of Brylcreem
into his quiff
and delves
through sand and gravel,
shrugging it off
his velveteen shoulders and arms.

Just
throw
him
a
cake
of
Sunlight
soap,
let
him
wash
him-
self
ashore.

Into a picture by Edward Hopper
of a gas station
in the mid-West
where Hopper takes as his theme
light, the spooky
glow of an illuminated sign
reading Esso or Mobil
or what-have-you -
into such a desolate oval
ride two youths on a motorbike.
A hand gun. Balaclavas.
The pump attendant’s grown so used
to hold-ups he calls them:
Beannacht Dé ar an obair.

The pump attendant’s not to know
he’s being watched by a gallowglass
hot-foot from a woodcut
by Derricke,
who skips across the forecourt
and kicks the black
plastic bucket
they left as a memento.
Nor is the gallowglass any the wiser.
The bucket’s packed with fertilizer
and a heady brew
of sugar and paraquat’s
relentlessly gnawing its way through
the floppy knot of a Durex.

It was this self-same pump attendant
who dragged the head and torso
clear
and mouthed an Act of Contrition
in the frazzled ear
and overheard
those already-famous last words
Moose ... Indian.
‘Next of all wus the han’. ‘Be Japers.’
‘The sodgers cordonned-off the area
wi’ what-ye-may-call-it tape.’
‘Lunimous.’ ‘They foun’ this hairy
han’ wi’ a drowneded man’s grip
on a lunimous stone no bigger than a ...’

‘Huh.’

© Paul Muldoon, permissons Faber & Faber Ltd.

Paul Muldoon has woven several images of a troubled Belfast into this narrative poem, the tarring and feathering of women, UDR checkpoints, command wires to milk churn bombs, weeping gelignite, kalashnikovs and the mercury tilt switch used in undercar bombs for instance. The poem is also suffused with Belfast street patois, ‘skite’ and ‘glipe’, ‘dab hand’ and ‘out to lunch’, for example.