Selected Poetry
ABATTOIR
The stench of knackered horse carcasses seethes
into noon’s flushed stagnant light. Each slow
inescapable death breath blights, impedes,
confuses; hits home with a body blow’s
paralyzing insistence, let me in.
My one fan whines full tilt, I try to write,
but the sweat sticks, rasps like a second skin.
A stoned sun blanks down on the same old shite.
Blue skies blacken. Somnolent church bells toll.
Coarse hands sort the day’s takings in a till.
Our streetlight blinks and goes out. One by one
the furniture store’s night screens rattle shut.
A school bus bearing the shades of burnt-out
Workers belches past, RUTA: BABYLON.
* * *
Island Sonnets
ix
As knowledge deepens, so sorrows increase.
Tired of islands, women, psalms, and poets,
I lounge with sailors, drinking seven seas;
those mad ones howling in their shacks of bone,
lit always by the glitter of the wave
that breaks the blue depths of their solitudes;
not for them the quiet agony
of years spent in dregs, attempting to atone
for black self-loathing, but surfeit of love
for all things that labour under the sun;
whose lips are full music, mirth and wine.
Those are the ones I wish to lay me down
in an old skiff at lovely dusk to burn
at journey’s end, unknowing, and alone.
* * *
CEASEFIRES, SAN SALVADOR
I was at home with gallows humour,
the saying nothing, and the slant newspeak
of old habits dying hard: a left footer
my own history had taught me to think
of “apparently motiveless murder”
as a settling of old scores; for “birth pangs
of democracy” read KEEP YOUR POWDER
DRY. But it was football, not politics
that night the new British ambassador
sat with us, minderless – ‘Guns at the door!’ –
in bar La Harpa, talking in morse code
and laughing too loud, but expertly side-
stepping our every ruse. I would remember
his tentative, ‘All right lads, what’s the score?’
* * *
Island Sonnets
viii
Errol Jacobs, herbalist and fisherman,
holds court in the sprawling palm-thatched hills, on
this, his hot tin hell, his hand-made Zion:
regal, a lion stretched in noon’s fired sun
watching grey industrial smoke hover
over the broken streets of Port-of-Spain.
All day he has trolled this calm sea’s blue glare
for his daily bread in a burnt-out bark
returning by the labour of his oar.
Now, the oil-lamps blaze in the lilting shack
as you climb this gently inclining slope
traced by phosphorescent fireflies at dusk:
‘Is I-and-I de noun, is JAH de verb.’
Impenetrable calm of holy herb.
* * *
IN BANDIT COUNTRY
Then Chiapas. San Cristobal felt like home.
Troops in armoured cars patrolling, AKs
cocked and poised. There I stood, a cliché, a sore thumb,
all aggro in a soiled Zapatista
tee-shirt, goading the macho Federales
as we posed by scrawled dirt-wall graffiti –
VIVA LA LUCHA ARMADA! – and murals
of ski-masked men with rifles raised. To me
it was déjà: race/class warfare live –
old anti-Indian red-scare politricks
revisited – though I dismissed as bluff
and divisive my road-block theatrics,
I laughed it off later as instinctive.
Windmill-tilting. Lashing out at the pricks.
* * *
LOUGH REE
A fish flares at dusk
silver scales
in the heron's ears.
* * *
MAN
I was bloody long surfing the Net
by the time I managed to tear my brain
away I was so drained, nauseated
by the endless scenes of man's inhuman-
ity to man - barbed wire, bulldozed homes, burnt-out
streets, sectarian hatred, suicide,
bomb blasts, torture victims - I said, fuck it,
and scoured the papers for movies instead.
I wanted to escape reality
for a bit, I lit up a little
healing herb I'd stashed, and the Babylon
pressure was just starting to drop as we
stepped out to see a movie that was all
about man inhumanity to man.
* * *
REVENANT
I was standing out of the wind and rain
under a restless oak that day in fall,
watching drops drill down the grey inscription
of a headstone, hard by the graveyard wall,
when something stirred on the periphery
of vision: a blurred shadow forming still
in the darkening forest of memory,
he moved like someone running from the law,
tense and distracted; like someone I knew
once but had forgotten. It was only
when he stood out flush under the lamplight
that the shock registered at what I saw
as now I recognized him. Half his gaunt
rotting face was bruised blue-black and his throat
wheezed as he began to speak. ‘You're all right,’
he said, calming me, ‘I must look a sight,
and there isn’t too much of a yarn to tell
if I still remember right...One raw wet night
I’d just drove home from Saoirse’s, drunk as hell,
when the strangest notion took me to phone
her late. What she said then I don’t recall
but when I came to the receiver had gone
dead. I sat there ’til all hours of the night,
holed up like a wild dog in the dark den
of my head - praying, crying - all that shite.
I’d known hard times, and always liked a drop,
but this was different: my soused head was light
with the one thought returning, to escape;
everything in sight provoked and tempted -
kitchen knives, crossbeams, a coiled length of rope
I’d stored in the attic. I was so cold
inside, with this feeling the walls were closin’
in around me as I listened, hypnotised
by the clock’s tick and whirr and carry-on;
I watched the brass pendulum rise and fall
behind the glass, with a scything motion,
in the room dark as a confessional.
A tape was playing in the background, a reel
or a ... something Traditional, when my whole
life flashed before me. Music at the gable.
The green sea rolling calm. My Mother’s grave.
Cold sunshine on the hills of Donegal.
For years I had walked the sharp edge of a cliff
never daring to look forward or within.
I lost my grip...The rest you know yourself.’
The rain had eased now and the distant din
of traffic become audible once more
as damp night-winds whirled and moaned a low keen
round the headstones; fumbling with a lighter,
I turned again to face the broken man
who’d haunted me since I was three or four.
‘Could you not have talked it out with someone?’
Before you denied the light?’ I blurted.
How come there was no warning given?’
‘If it was as simple now as all that
we’d both know,’ he winced, ‘my wits were astray,
unable to absorb what you call light.
Still and all, you writer-types can surely
appreciate the labyrinth that is pain;
you’re no longer the scraggly wee shit I
remember lookin’ after as a wain –
Jesus, there were time you were contrary.
You nearly drove your Ma and I insane,’
he grinned, half-forgetting. Then he fixed me
to the spot with a sudden angry glare
that held a hint of accusation: ‘I
shouldered more than I should have had to bear.
I blamed all round me - parents, ye, friends - the lot.
Guilt is the worst millstone I’ve had to wear.’
‘In the note...’ I pressed, but he pre-empted:
‘When herself took off that was the final straw,
but there was more to it than simply that:
No, I was tired of playing the outlaw,
on the run from nobody but my own spooked
self.’ And then that look again: ‘But you, why
should you be botherin’ your silly head
with this tired old shite now? Yesterday’s news
belongs to yesterday … Besides I was bombed
out of my skull at the time on pills and booze.’
‘This one time with my father, after a few
shots, he’d sang Carrickfergus, your party-piece,
when he turned to me, and out of the blue:
“That one always reminds me of Maguire.”
I thought that night your ghost was coming through.’
He was smiling now, beginning to tire;
as he ruminated among stray thoughts
his eyes burned like flames on oily water.
‘I did often wonder what effect all this
might have had on you later on in years,
but you’re round the same age now as I was
the night I staggered up them curséd stairs
never to see daylight again...but, aye,
there were times too: whiskey-addled affairs
of lonely triumph. Times where I thought I could see
deeper into the scheme of things than I
thought possible. Brief flashes when I felt free
of myself and the mental nets that bound me,’
he half laughed, half conscious of allusion,
‘ – a freedom that lasted that moment only.
So if you’re in search of some revelation
look to the facts, not what you want to see.
I was an own goal waitin’ to happen.
A waste plot. A man without a story.’
At that he turned but before he disappeared
into a fresh downpour. ‘Remember now,’
I heard him say, ‘you'll be a long time dead.’
* * *
THE STALLION
For days he bucked and reeled in the stable
with me on his back pressed between the wall
and rafters, so it was a miracle
if you could mount him once without a fall.
Neighbours gaped when I rode him round four acres
Of hard ground we used to call the garden
With my grandfather roaring, ‘hold the reins!’
But to say he was really broken in
You had to mount him out in the open
where he’d leave you seeing stars, arse over head,
till he fell snorting, grimed with muck and blood,
in pure exhaustion; it was only then
I saw , in that bloodshot eye, I had killed
everything in him that I must loved.
* * *
THEM WAS THE DAYS
for Nana
I write lines knowing they won’t quite scan
like twilight stanzas of daffodils
ablaze now in your little white-walled garden
facing the crossroads. The long evening fills
with the hidden cries of children playing high
in the limbs of one loved oak’s heavy green-
ness. I stand there, lost momentarily
in the sad half-light of what might have been
had I stayed … Photographs … Them was the days!
We laugh late over cups of strong sweet tea,
thick slabs of treacle bread, taking our ease –
the stormed clouds of those exiled years apart
dissolving now as I re-enter the
natural harbour of your most sacred heart.
