Lunch With Pancho Villa

I
‘Is it really a revolution, though?’
I reached across the wicker table
With another $10,000 question.
My celebrated pamphleteer,
Co-author of such volumes
As ‘Blood on the Rose’,
‘The Dream and the Drums’,
And ‘How It Happened Here’,
Would pour some untroubled Muscatel
And settle back in his cane chair.

‘Look, son. Just look around you.
People are getting themselves killed
Left, right and centre
While you do what? Write rondeaux?
There’s more to living in this country
Than stars and horses, pigs and trees,
Not that you’d guess it from your poems.
Do you never listen to the news?
You want to get down to something true,
Something a little nearer home.’

I called again later that afternoon,
A quiet suburban street.
‘You want to stand back a little
When the world’s at your feet.’
I’d have liked to have heard some more
Of his famous revolution.
I rang the bell, and knocked hard
On what I remembered as his front door,
That opened then, as such doors do,
Directly on to a back yard.

II
Not any back yard, I’m bound to say,
And not a thousand miles away
From here. No one’s taken in, I’m sure,
By such a mild invention.
But where (I wonder myself) do I stand,
In relation to a table and chair,
The quince-tree I forgot to mention,
That suburban street, the door, the yard –
All made up as I went along
As things that people live among.

And such a person as lived here!
My celebrated pamphleteer!
Of course, I gave it all away
With those preposterous titles.
‘The Bloody Rose’? ‘The Dream and the Drums’?
The three-day-wonder of the flowing-plum!
Or was I desperately wishing
To have been their other co-author,
Or, at least, to own a first edition
Of ‘The Boot Boys and Other Battles’?

‘When are you going to tell the truth?’
For there’s no such book, so far as I know,
As ‘How It Happened Here’,
Though there may be. There may.
What should I say to this callow youth
Who learned to write last winter –
One of those correspondence courses –
And who’s coming to lunch today?
He’ll be rambling on, no doubt,
About pigs and trees, stars and horses.

© Paul Muldoon, permissons Faber & Faber Ltd.

Paul Muldoon who was criticised for not writing directly about the Troubles answered: “The poems I’ve written about the political situation there tend to be oblique, and I think properly so: they tend to look slightly farther back at the society from which the situation erupted, at why we are how we are now.”