Part 12 (1/2)

Unless forgiveness finds its nerve and voice, Unless the helmeted and bleeding tree Can green and open buds like infants' fists And the fouled magma incubate Bright nymphs ... My people think money And talk weather. Oil-rigs lull their future On single acquisitive stems. Silence Has shoaled into the trawlers' echo-sounders.

The ground we kept our ear to for so long Is flayed or calloused, and its entrails Tented by an impious augury.

Our island is full of comfortless noises.'

III AT THE WATER'S EDGE

On Devenish I heard a snipe

And the keeper's recital of elegies Under the tower. Carved monastic heads Were crumbling like bread on water.

On Boa the G.o.d-eyed, s.e.x-mouthed stone Socketed between graves, two-faced, trepanned, Answered my silence with silence.

A stoup for rain water. Anathema.

From a cold hearthstone on Horse Island I watched the sky beyond the open chimney And listened to the thick rotations Of an army helicopter patrolling.

A hammer and a cracked jug full of cobwebs Lay on the window-sill. Everything in me Wanted to bow down, to offer up, To go barefoot, foetal and penitential, And pray at the water's edge.

How we crept before we walked! I remembered The helicopter shadowing our march at Newry, The scared, irrevocable steps.

The Toome Road

One morning early I met armoured cars

In convoy, warbling along on powerful tyres, All camouflaged with broken alder branches, And headphoned soldiers standing up in turrets.

How long were they approaching down my roads As if they owned them? The whole country was sleeping.

I had rights-of-way, fields, cattle in my keeping, Tractors. .h.i.tched to buckrakes in open sheds, Silos, chill gates, wet slates, the greens and reds Of outhouse roofs. Whom should I run to tell Among all of those with their back doors on the latch For the bringer of bad news, that small-hours visitant Who, by being expected, might be kept distant?

Sowers of seed, erectors of headstones ...

O charioteers, above your dormant guns, It stands here still, stands vibrant as you pa.s.s, The invisible, untoppled omphalos.

A Drink of Water

She came every morning to draw water

Like an old bat staggering up the field: The pump's whooping cough, the bucket's clatter And slow diminuendo as it filled, Announced her. I recall Her grey ap.r.o.n, the pocked white enamel Of the br.i.m.m.i.n.g bucket, and the treble Creak of her voice like the pump's handle.

Nights when a full moon lifted past her gable It fell back through her window and would lie Into the water set out on the table.

Where I have dipped to drink again, to be Faithful to the admonishment on her cup, Remember the Giver, fading off the lip.

The Strand at Lough Beg in memory of Colum McCartney All round this little island, on the strand

Far down below there, where the breakers strive,

Grow the tall rushes from the oozy sand.

Dante, Purgatorio, I, 100103 Leaving the white glow of filling stations And a few lonely streetlamps among fields You climbed the hills towards Newtownhamilton Past the Fews Forest, out beneath the stars Along that road, a high, bare pilgrim's track Where Sweeney fled before the bloodied heads, Goat-beards and dogs' eyes in a demon pack Blazing out of the ground, snapping and squealing.

What blazed ahead of you? A faked roadblock?

The red lamp swung, the sudden brakes and stalling Engine, voices, heads hooded and the cold-nosed gun?

Or in your driving mirror, tailing headlights That pulled out suddenly and flagged you down Where you weren't known and far from what you knew: The lowland clays and waters of Lough Beg, Church Island's spire, its soft treeline of yew.

There you once heard guns fired behind the house Long before rising time, when duck shooters Haunted the marigolds and bulrushes, But still were scared to find spent cartridges, Acrid, bra.s.sy, genital, ejected, On your way across the strand to fetch the cows.

For you and yours and yours and mine fought shy, Spoke an old language of conspirators And could not crack the whip or seize the day: Big-voiced scullions, herders, feelers round Hayc.o.c.ks and hindquarters, talkers in byres, Slow arbitrators of the burial ground.

Across that strand of yours the cattle graze Up to their bellies in an early mist And now they turn their unbewildered gaze To where we work our way through squeaking sedge Drowning in dew. Like a dull blade with its edge Honed bright, Lough Beg half-s.h.i.+nes under the haze.

I turn because the sweeping of your feet Has stopped behind me, to find you on your knees With blood and roadside muck in your hair and eyes, Then kneel in front of you in br.i.m.m.i.n.g gra.s.s And gather up cold handfuls of the dew To wash you, cousin. I dab you clean with moss Fine as the drizzle out of a low cloud.

I lift you under the arms and lay you flat.

With rushes that shoot green again, I plait Green scapulars to wear over your shroud.

Casualty