though not one of us
heard it from where we stood on the beaches and car-parks
and cycle-tracks skirting the water. What had they come for?
From Carrickfergus to Helen’s Bay, birdwatchers with binoculars
held sway while the city sat empty. The whales grew frenzied.
Children sighed when they dived, then clapped as they rose
again, Christ-like and shining, from the sea, though they could have been
dying out there,
smack bang
in the middle of the ferries’ trajectory, for all we knew.
Or attempting to die. These were Newfoundland whales,
radically adrift from their feeding grounds, but we took them
as a gift: as if our own lost magnificent ship
had re-entered the Lough, transformed and triumphant,
to visit us. As if those runaway fires on the spines of the hills
had been somehow extinguished …
For now,
they were here. And there was nothing whatsoever to be said.
New islands in the water between Eden and Holywood.
ALAN GILLIS
(b.1973)
12th October, 1994
I enter the Twilight Zone,
the one run
by Frankie ‘Ten Pints’ Fraser, and slide the heptagon
of my twenty
pence piece into its slot. The lights come on.
Sam the Sham
and the Pharaohs are playing Wooly Bully.
A virtual combat zone lights up the green
of my eyes,
my hand clammy on the joystick, as Johnny ‘Book
Keeper’ McFeeter
saunters in and Smokey sings The Tracks of My Tears.
He gives the nod
to Betty behind the bulletproof screen.
Love of my life, he says, and she says,
ach Johnny,
when who do you know but Terry ‘The Blaster’ McMaster
levels in
and B Bumble and the Stingers start playing Nut Rocker.
I shoot down
a sniper and enter a higher level.
Betty buzzes Frankie who has a shifty
look around,
poking his nut around a big blue door, through which
I spy
Billy ‘Warts’ McBreeze drinking tea and tapping his toes
to Randy
and The Rainbows’ version of Denise.
On the screen I mutilate a double-agent
Ninja and collect
a bonus drum of kerosene. Game of Love by Wayne
Fontana pumps
out of the machine, when I have to catch my breath,
realizing Ricky
‘Rottweiler’ Rice is on my left
saying watch for the nifty fucker
with the cross-
bow on the right. Sweat-purls tease my spine, tensed ever
more rigidly,
when Ricky’s joined by Andy ‘No Knees’ Tweed,
both of them
whistling merrily to The Crystals’ Then He Kissed Me.
What the fuck is going on
here, asks
Victor ‘Steel Plate’ Hogg, as he slides through the fire
door. The kid’s
on level 3, says Andy. At which point Frankie does his nut,
especially since
The Cramps are playing Can Your Pussy Do the Dog?
Betty puts on Curtis and the Clichés’
Brush Against Me
Barbarella instead, when the first helicopter shreds the air
to the left
of the screen. Gathering my wits and artillery, I might eclipse
the high score
of Markie ‘Life Sentence’ Prentice, set on October 6th.
I hear Benny ‘Vindaloo’ McVeigh say,
right we’re going
to do this fucking thing. By now the smoke is so thick
the screen is almost grey.
The Shangri-Las are playing Remember (Walkin’ in the Sand).
Frankie says
no, Victor, nobody’s going to fucking disband.
Bob B Soxx and the Blue Jeans are playing
Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah.
Through a napalm blur I set the interns free. They wear US
marine khaki.
Jimmy ‘Twelve Inch’ Lynch says, son, not bad for 20p.
I leave the Zone and go
back to the fierce grey day. It looks like snow.
Progress
They say that for years Belfast was backwards
and it’s great now to see some progress.
So I guess we can look forward to taking boxes
from the earth. I guess that ambulances
will leave the dying back amidst the rubble
to be explosively healed. Given time,
one hundred thousand particles of glass
will create impossible patterns in the air
before coalescing into the clarity
of a window. Through which, a reassembled head
will look out and admire the shy young man
taking his bomb from the building and driving home.
CAITRÍONA O’REILLY
(b.1973)
A Lecture Upon the Bat
of the species Pipistrellus pipistrellus.
Matchstick-sized, from the stumps of their tails
to the tips of their noses. On reversible toes,
dangling from gables like folded umbrellas.
Some of them live for thirty years
and die dangling. They hang on
like the leaves they pretended to be,
then like dying leaves turn dry.
Suspicions amongst thoughts are like bats
amongst birds, Francis Bacon writes,
they fly ever by twilight. But commonsense,
not sixth sense, makes them forage at night.
For the art of bat-pressing is not dead.
Inside numberless books, like tiny black flowers,
lie flattened bats. Even Shakespeare
was a keen bat-fowler, or so it’s said.
In medieval beast books
extract of bat was a much-prized
depilator. Reremice be blind as moles,
and lick powder and suck
oil out of lamps, and be most cold
of kind, therefore the blood
of a reremouse, nointed upon the legs,
suffereth not the hair to grow again.
And how toothsome is fruit-bat soup
when boiled in the pot for an hour!
Small wonder then that the Mandarin
for both ‘happiness’ and ‘bat’ is ‘fu’.
Bats have had a bad press.
Yet they snaffle bugs by the thousand
and carefully clean their babies’ faces.
Their lives are quieter than this
bat lore would have us believe.
Bats overhead on frangible wings,
piping ultrasonic vespers.
Bats utterly wrapped up in themselves.
Heliotrope
Past beautiful,
stuck in the dust
of a road, her thin
branched head
with its baby hair
and dozen white eyes
so anthropomorphized
and mute – her lover
going down the sky
daily in his flaming steps
and she with her
padlocked gaze –
eternal follower!
Yet the circle’s story
fixes her
at its centre –
her greenish rooted
limbs keep company
with all the buried
girls and boys
whose lost testes
and ovules stir to life
again this month –
under the soft rain
of a god’s grief
the hyacinth and lotus
come, with narcissus
on his sex-struck stem.
LEONTIA FLYNN
(b.1974)
By My Skin
for Terry McGaughey
Mr Bennet in Pride and Prejudice – The Musical!,
my father communicates with his family almost entirely through song.
From the orange linoleum and trumpet-sized wallpaper flowers
of the late 1970s, he steps with a roll of cotton,
a soft-shoe routine, and a pound of soft white paraffin.
He sings ‘Oft in the Stilly Night’ and ‘Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms’.
He sings ‘Edelweiss’ and ‘Cheek to Cheek’ from Top Hat.
Disney-animals are swaying along the formica sink-top
where he gets me into a lather. He greases behind my knees
and the folds of my elbows; he wraps me in swaddling clothes.
Then lifts me up with his famous high-shouldered shuffle
– ‘Yes Sir, That’s My Baby!’ – to the candlewick bunk.
The air is bright with a billion exfoliate flitters
as he changes track – one for his changeling child:
‘Hauld Up Your Head My Bonnie Wee Lass and Dinnae Look So Shy’.
He sings ‘Put Your Shoes On, Lucy (Don’t You Know You’re In The City)’.
He sings ‘Boolavogue’ and ‘Can’t Help Loving that Man of Mine’
and ‘Lily the Pink’ and ‘The Woods of Gortnamona’.
He sings – the lights are fading – ‘Slievenamon’
and about the ‘Boy Blue’ (who awakens ‘to angel song’).
My father is Captain Von Trapp, Jean Valjean, Professor Henry Higgins –
gathering his repertoire, with the wheatgerm and cortisone,
like he’s gathering up a dozen tribute roses.
Then, taking a bow, he lays these – just so – by my skin
which gets better and worse, and worse and better again.
Drive
My mother’s car is parked in the gravel drive
outside the house. A breeze springs
from the shore, and blows against this traffic sign
standing between the by-road and the main road
where somewhere a cricket ticks like a furious clock.
My mother’s car is an estimable motor,
a boxy thing – the car in which my mother,
during a morning’s work, will sometimes drive
to Dundrum, Ballykinlar, Seaford, Clough,
‘Newcastle’, ‘Castlewellan’, ‘Analong’.
They drive along the old road and the new road –
my father, in beside her, reads the signs
as they escape him – for now they are empty signs,
now one name means as little as another;
the roads they drive along are fading roads.
– ‘Dromore’, ‘Banbridge’ (my father’s going to drive
my mother to distraction). ‘In Banbridge town …’, he sings.
She turns the car round, glancing at the clock
and thinks for a moment, turning back the clock,
of early marriage – love! – under the sign
of youth and youthful fortunes – back, in the spring,
the first great mystery, of life together:
my mother’s indefatigable drive
keeping them both on the straight and narrow road,
and, as they pass ‘Killough’ or ‘Drumaroad’,
she thinks of children – broods a while (cluck cluck),
on their beginnings (this last leg of this drive
leads back to the empty house which she takes as a sign) …
how does it work, she thinks, this little motor?
Where are its cogs, and parts and curly oiled springs
that make her now, improbably, the wellspring
of five full persons – out upon life’s highroads:
a grown-up son, a gang of grown-up daughters,
prodigal, profligate – with 30 years on their clocks?
She doesn’t know, and isn’t one to assign
meaning to their ways, their worlds’ bewildering drives –
though she tells this offspring she’s nearing the end of the road
a clock ticks softly … the low pulse of some drive …?
My mother watches. She’s waiting for a sign …
NICK LAIRD
(b.1975)
Pedigree
There are many of us.
My aunt,
the youngest sister,
is a reformed shoplifter.
An uncle breeds champion bantams.
Another, a pig-farmer,
has a racket smuggling cattle
back and forth and back across
the imaginary border.
Me, I’ve forty-seven cousins.
A scuffle over rustling sheep
became a stabbing in a bar outside Armagh,
and a murderer swings
from a branch high up in our family tree.
Which isn’t a willow.
Instead,
an enormous unruly blackthorn hedge,
inside of which a corpse is tangled,
and sags from branch to branch,
like a dewy web:
a farmer jumped on the road, and strangled,
his pockets emptied
of the stock proceeds from the county fair
by two local Roman Catholic farmhands.
Riots in Donegal town when they were cleared.
And riots again when they were convicted.
I may be out on a limb.
One grandfather, the short-horn cattle dealer,
went bankrupt, calmly smoked his pipe,
and died at forty of lung cancer.
Martha, my grandmother, remade Heathhill a dairy farm
and when the rent man came
my mother’d hide behind the sofa with her brothers.
My father spent his boyhood fishing with a hook and tinfoil chocolate wrapper.
He coveted a Davy Crockett hat
and shined the medals of his legendary uncles
who’d all died at the Somme,
the Dragoon Guards of Inniskilling.
He left school without sitting his papers
and my mother dropped out to marry him.
Each evening after work and dinner,
she’d do her OU course,
and heave the brown suitcase of books
from out beneath the rickety, mythical bunks
I shared for ten years with my sister.
There is such a shelter in each other.
And you, you pad from the bathroom to Gershwin,
gentled with freckles and moisturized curves,
still dripping, made new, singing your footprints
as they singe the wood floor,
perfect in grammar and posture.
But before you passed me the phone
you were talking, and I couldn’t help but note your tone,
as if you couldn’t hear them right,
as if they were maybe calling
not from just across the water
but Timbuktu, or from the moon …
At least you can hear me, my darling,
I’m speaking so softly and clearly,
and this is a charge not a pleading.
IX
* * *
SONGS AND BALLADS SINCE 1801
Shall the Harp then be silent?
Thomas Moore,
‘Shall the Harp Then be Silent’
THOMAS MOORE
from Irish Melodies
War Song:
Remember the Glories of Brien the Brave
Remember the glories of Brien the brave,
Tho’ the days of the hero are o’er;
Tho’ lost to Mononia and cold in the grave
He ret
urns to Kinkora no more!
That star of the field, which so often has pour’d
Its beam on the battle is set;
But enough of its glory remains on each sword,
To light us to victory yet!
Mononia! when Nature embellish’d the tint
Of thy fields, and thy mountains so fair,
Did she ever intend that a tryant should print
The footstep of slavery there?
No, Freedom! whose smile we shall never resign,
Go, tell our invaders, the Danes,
That ’tis sweeter to bleed for an age at thy shrine,
Than to sleep but a moment in chains!
Forget not our wounded companions, who stood
In the day of distress by our side;
While the moss of the valley grew red with their blood,
They stirr’d not, but conquer’d and died!
That sun which now blesses our arms with his light,
Saw them fall upon Ossory’s plain!
Oh, let him not blush, when he leaves us tonight,
To find that they fell there in vain!
The Song of Fionnuala
Silent, oh Moyle! be the roar of thy water,
Break not, ye breezes, your chain of repose,
While, murmuring mournfully, Lir’s lonely daughter
Tells to the night-star her tale of woes.
When shall the swan, her death-note singing,
Sleep, with wings in darkness furl’d?
When will heaven, its sweet bell ringing,
Call my spirit from this stormy world?
Sadly, oh Moyle! to thy winter wave weeping,
Fate bids me languish long ages away;
Yet still in her darkness doth Erin lie sleeping,
Still doth the pure light its dawning delay!
When will that day-star, mildly springing,
Warm our isle with peace and love?
When will heaven, its sweet bell ringing,
Call my spirit to the fields above?
She is Far from the Land
She is far from the land where her young hero sleeps,
And lovers are round her, sighing;
But coldly she turns from their gaze, and weeps,
For her heart in his grave is lying!
She sings the wild song of her dear native plains,
Every note which he lov’d awaking –
Ah! little they think who delight in her strains,
How the heart of the minstrel is breaking!
The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry Page 75
