Primroses

Arthur Morrin and Peter Kane
built our house in a patient time,
hoisted blocks, hammered nails,
gouged window spaces out of hostile
stone in the walls of an old stable
while chestnuts fattened on the trees outside
and while snow fell and froze and melted.

Our dray always lurched into this hollow
in the shimmering heat of Summer
when we swayed on top of a load
of hay and waited in fright to fall off.
We had a tractor alright, an old
monster on giant wheels that could have done the job
but my father would rather horse and dray.

Rust and rain have taken the tractor,
the horse is slaughtered, the dray decayed
the motorway buried the lurching hollow
where we perched on the hay in terror.

But primroses which someone
- perhaps the grandmother taken by an epidemic
in the 'Twenties, one of the lost millions -
planted on a bank appear every Spring
and the children still laugh at the good of it.

Published, 1999, in Snakeskin, February issue

Dancing with the Germans

At the start, our women itched for exotic Germans
who stuttered with empty tanks from neutral skies,
London, Bristol, Liverpool, crackling behind them,
and drifted onto soft, Irish grass among bored cattle;
where we arrested them, rattled them swiftly to camp
to plot impossible escape, brood on Fatherland,
wait for triumph or shame, finality, a new start.
We were not hard on them (we got no thanks),
paroled them to public houses, dance halls, our girls.
When they stepped out to Jimmy Dunny's Orchestra
they tantalized the Newbridge women
for they were novelties, starched, stiff,
every man an officer, or as good as!
Then on a chilly Saturday night at war's end,
shrivelled faces framed in barbed wire fences
stared awkwardly from a newsreel at our women;
who learned new names: Belsen, Dachau, Treblinka;
innocence shuffled away. Bands tuned up in dance halls;
later in Lawlor's Ballroom Jimmy Dunny played
smartly polkas, old time waltzes, two-steps, but no-one wanted
to dance with the Germans, in the shocked silence.

Published, 1999, in Snakeskin, September issue

Exile

His childhood died in a nightmare.
He was in the front garden
of a country cottage
like a cottage in a story;
his father was there too, digging:
everything was perfect.
Then the child looked across the fields
to the small hills, like hills
out of a children's book,
and a mushroom cloud loomed up
from behind the small hills,
sombre and monstrous,
as colossal as a mountain.

The child knew the world was dead.
A cloud of grief and despair
unfolded in him.
His father noticed nothing
and kept on digging through the death.
The child woke up but it was true:
the cloud was there, the world was dead.

He still wants to return.
Once I saw him look in winter
over the city's snow capped roofs
and past the icy suburbs
and across the white fields
to the hills behind the city,
and I saw him shake his head
and flick his cigarette
into the slushy street,
where it hissed and died.

Published, 1999, in Snakeskin, October issue

No sanctuary

Doesn't it sound like peace in this chapel?
Stooped old men in a dark choir, girded with rosaries
peer from monks' hoods with wrinkled faces,
raise voices to god in harmony,
swelling and soaring, the stained glass windows seem to listen:
you'd think humanity had surpassed humanity.

One of these men will walk from this church in anger,
one will leave with a sly smile twisting his lips,
one will plot and plan and pretend
and one will strike a bitter blow to fix
one who played a bitter trick on him. Yet

the faithful visit here for peace and for goodness
and these men's hands make miracles of stone and earth
and miracles of ink and paper, lives and voices;
every patch of grass, every field and corner
speaks of peace and of work and of goodness.

But here too men speak spitefully of other men
and here men thwart other men for bitter decades,
detestation and dislike make friends
and men who whisper ill of other men are praised;
men plot to deny their brothers' advancement
and go to the grave with curses for prayers.

Peace visits this place no more often
than cities that glare with neon,
than streets where good things are done and hearts broken,
than streets where hearts are mended and bad things done;
and there is no refuge from the world in the end
in this place there is no refuge,
there is only the world in the end.

Published, 1999, in Snakeskin, September issue

The meat man's rant to the vegetarians

Eating shite out of a plastic box again,
you moaners and whingers who eat to live?
Eat? Greens, beans - and not the beans you get in tins -
roughage, dear God, chewing, mandibles straining.
Eating as an act of public contempt
for gobblers of steak and bacon and chicken,
for scoundrels who want sugar in their tea.
Looking at ye eating would make a man sick,
taking out your plastic - ha! - lunch boxes,
opening them reverentially,
commencing to chew with grim little smiles
whatever sludge is contained inside.
Eating you may reflect on your goodness
compared to those who have not seen the light
or lack the moral - if you can tolerate a pun - fibre.

I would rather be marked down as a sinner
in the book of vegetarian crimes
and sentenced to a hell of roast beef and gravy
than dine in paradise on the likes of that.

Published, 1999, in Books Ireland, May issue.

Eco-warrior

He crouches
like a leopard
over dials
sniffs out prey.
Like a man who shoots little birds on Sundays
at the edge of the forest
he hunts decibels
on hard margins by motorways;
tracks transgressors in company registration files
studies spoors in county development plans.
He sucks sustenance for his long stalking from environmental impact studies,
perches now and then on trees
daring growling chainsaws,
happy as a child in a garden
absorbed by action who has become the doing itself.

Published, 1999, in Books Ireland, December issue.