If we called it The Bereavements would we weigh the number more heavily?
And me? I’m just a Corkman writing poems about histories I didn’t share. ‘What’s it like for you to live in this foreign country?’ a Belfast Protestant man asked me once. That same morning a Catholic man had said to me, ‘I love your city, Belfast and Cork are the two best cities, but those Dublin fellas? They’re wankers.’ Perhaps we are all always local and foreign to each other. Neighbour, stranger and enemy.
In the name of the neighbour
And of the stranger
And in the shadowed shelter of each other.
Amen.
One time I sat in a room with a Catholic woman whose dad had been shot dead in an ambush. She’d heard that one of the ambulance men, a Protestant, had never again been right after his shift that day.
‘There’s many as weren’t killed that still died,’ she said. And she was right.
T h e F a c t s o f L i f e
That you were born
and you will die.
That you will sometimes love enough
and sometimes not.
That you will lie
if only to yourself.
That you will get tired.
That you will learn most from the situations
you did not choose.
That there will be some things that move you
more than you can say.
That you will live
that you must be loved.
That you will avoid questions most urgently in need of your attention.
That you began as the fusion of a sperm and an egg
of two people who once were strangers
and may well still be.
That life isn’t fair.
That life is sometimes good
and sometimes even better than good.
That life is often not so good.
That life is real
and if you can survive it, well,
survive it well
with love
and art
and meaning given
where meaning’s scarce.
That you will learn to live with regret.
That you will learn to live with respect.
That the structures that constrict you
may not be permanently constraining.
That you will probably be okay.
That you must accept change
before you die
but you will die anyway.
So you might as well live
and you might as well love.
You might as well love.
You might as well love.
h u n g e r s t r i k e r s
And there was banging on the bins that night
and many frightened people woke
and noted down the hour.
The clock of hunger-strikers dead is not ignored
with ease
and ‘please, God, please keep loved ones safe’
was then
repeated round and round and round
like rosaries told upon a bead,
or shoes upon the ground of orange walking.
The five demands, the five-year plan
that saw a blanket round a man,
the dirty protest, Thatcher stance,
that gave a new and startling glance
at just how deep a people’s fury goes.
And God knows each single mother’s son
was sick of hunger,
all those younger faces became stripped and old
eyes shrunk back and foreheads cold & bold
with skin that’s limp and paper thin,
barely separating blood and bone from stone.
And some did say ‘enough is now enough’
and others said that ‘never, never, never will a
martyr die,
he’ll smile upon us long from mural’s wall’.
And others said ‘what nation’s this?
we’re abandoned on our own −
all this for clothes to warm some dying bones’
And some said ‘that’s a traitor’s talk’
and others bowed their heads and thought that they
would hate to go that way.
Then Bobby Sands was dead
and there was banging on the bin lids on the Falls
echoed through to Shankill gospel halls.
And there was trouble on the street that night
and black flags started hanging while
people started ganging up,
black flags marking out the borders of belonging
the thin black barricade
that’s been around for thirty years
and stayed a fragile point up till today and cries
of how ten mothers’ sons all starved and died
when all they ate was hope and pride.
S a c r a m e n t a l
If there is a heaven, and I’m not sure there’s not,
at its harbour will be waters that we’ve travelled,
sometimes seeing
mostly not.
And at its hearth will be people saying
welcome, welcome, welcome
to where you’ve always been a
part of.
Who knows where we started,
or how this journey ends.
All we know is that