51% British

Why am I doing this?

2011-11-08T11:00:00.000-08:00

This is a collection of my poetry, written over the last 20 years. Much of it stems from my experience as a protestant growing up close to the border and how that apprehension has shaped me far beyond the claustrophobic grasp of a time and a place where terrible things could happen and often did.

I think that experience deserves to be written about. As you might imagine, the majority of these poems are written from a protestant perspective. For better or for worse, this is my tribe and these are the people I know the best. If you have any sense, you write about what you know. It couldn't be more 'niche.' But it's my niche.

I am trying to be a lyrical witness to an era of almost incomprehensible cruelty. I don't know why it's so important to me. It just is.

In 1992, I was standing in the Gatelodge of HMP Grendon as a new entrant prison officer, opening and closing gates. This was the era before mobiles. My pager went off telling me to call a number I didn't recognise. It was the Independent newspaper saying they wanted to publish a poem I had written called The Land Cries. That little bit of validation was the start of it. I haven't stopped writing since, under the radar, as I've progressed haphazardly through life.

I don't know how right I've got the voices or the places or the tone - you be the judge of that. But I can say that this collection is dedicated to the 'quiet people,' whatever church they went to. The people that saw maybe too much but found a way of enduring through our dirty, lethal little fight.

Semtex

2011-11-08T02:42:00.000-08:00

They put their tyrant in the sand
The same land
The Inniskillings
Helped shove Rommel into
And paid in Irish blood
The price of that and other wars
Was written on a Cenotaph
Which, blasted with his autograph
Became his Freestone hex
They put their tyrant in the sand
At God's left hand.

Vortex

2011-11-02T07:39:00.000-07:00

An army Gazelle
Leapt over the crown of a hill
Driving down a flock of sheep
Like poured cream
The pilot threw it deftly
Round the contours
Better to be heard and not seen
Over such unquiet acres
Helicopters supplied
The soundtrack to our little tragedy
For forty sour years
The raucous, rotary blatter
Stitching these skies to Empire
Spooking the Fresians
Announcing some unfolding bother
Just over horizons
That shrank to spitting distance
When the sun fell
Snapping smartly down and up
On frontier garrisons
Like God's yo-yos
The bluster of turbines
As familiar once
As the sound of your own voice
Has lately been unplugged
There's plenty still to look at
From incorrupted heights
But less appetite for seeing, maybe
Scaring the horses or not
Is now the sole province
Of the earthbound.

Credo

2011-10-17T00:54:00.001-07:00

If you must lapse

Perhaps

You’ll want to do it in style

Make your own heaven and earth

Become an Apostle without portfolio

An empirical saint

Worship any goat

With its feet on the ground

Form a new legion

Of punch-drunk relativists

Raising a glass in memory

Of the weekly hour

You once gave to God

And your recurring Presbyterian need
To not be thanked for it

Redhills

2011-09-20T14:11:00.001-07:00

Me and a few lost Foxhounds

Took it into us

To go stargazing

Fixing ourselves to earth

On the frozen, bald crust of a brae

A few feet of mud

From the United Kingdom

Flat on my back

With the final frontier

Occupying my mind’s eye

I reached into Britain

And transferred the allegiance
Of a snowdrop.

Navar conversion

2011-09-12T00:00:00.000-07:00

Up above the broad lough,

On the sharpened blade of rock,
That gives way to nothingness

A widow threw arms around heaven,

And cursed God.

Volatile elements conspired

To split open the sky,

And, even this late in the day,

Light and warmth fell through on her,
Laid hands on her

The colour and comfort of tea.

On that unlikely stage of Whins,

Hurting inexplicably gave way to being.

Going on became viable -

Maybe even blessed.

The wind hurried back over Donegal,

Frowning the water in its wake,
Swarming up the limestone

Anxious to end such foolishness

With a slap in the face.
But the purchase of grief,
So reliably set,
Had been planed away.
The sailing air,
Having nothing now to detain it,
Sailed on

The Winthrop method

2011-09-07T05:57:00.000-07:00

I see a line of dying Wych Elm on a hill
Well drained by the fractured blocks
Of this contested marl
A gaping stand of Famine food
Survivors of even earlier demands
For tight twisted grain
For good strong rudders, keels, coffins
For wagon wheels to get behind
Even the odd water main
But claimed now by the Dutch disease
The witless beetles killing the crown
Then further, further down.
There's a lot not right about this picture
And more, for one tree lies canted
Awkward against his listing brothers
Seen from a certain angle, could it be a marker?
The roots below hiding ordnance
In their parched grasp?
You'd need a thran outlook
And some plausible excuse these days
To go anywhere near it
This strange ruin located only
By a sleekid eye
An arborist, a terrorist.

The dogged people

2011-09-04T05:18:00.000-07:00

My crowd were taught to be
Whatever you aren't
Easier than unfolding your heart
Your curtailed self
When you're hemmed in
Up against that invisible line
As real as God
We were learned well, though
Being thoroughly outmanoeuvred
Run almost ragged as the flags
Planted in our hedgerows and halls
You couldn't have us now if you wanted us
Our unappeasing face
Is your creation
Yours alone

Bog geography

2011-09-01T16:31:00.001-07:00

A map on a rectory wall:

Once as potent as the chalice.

The red dots are faded,

A dimming constellation of loss,

A rolled over roll call,

A fallow murderscape,

Scaling years back and still to come

You could cover in one morning,

Needing any more death

Like a hole in the head

Control Zone

2011-07-06T06:16:00.001-07:00

Who recalls the cringing silence

Of a town centre?

The cowed shops

Already much wounded
Blind with plywood cataracts

Desperate measures

Posted in black and yellow

Forbade cars to be empty

- Pedestrian logic, these days -

Because one in a hundred

Would be far too low on its axles

For any innocent purpose.

A freight of kinetic badness

Filling the boot

Mixed with care

In some Leitrim hayshed
Might consequently need
To be abandoned
Somewhere 'softer'

The course of life and death

Made all the more perverse

By the bombs
That never went off.

Following the flag

2011-07-01T03:38:00.000-07:00

Shut blinds conceal

A coalition of wailing
The dead energy used
To put a broken face on straight

The journey from

Bungalow to Kirk

Is a hideous reversal

Of their wedding day
This time

She walks down that aisle alone

Through a stifled congregation

Of everyone that made her

Struck again and again

By the voracious sympathy

On each neighbour's face

Making it real like every nail

In the decorated coffin

Which left no space for her

At the very altar

Where she once said
In reverent wonder

'I do.'

Blakes

2011-06-30T00:36:00.000-07:00

Here, in the hollow
There was standing room only
For any slabber about politics
You put your mind to higher things:
Catching the barman's eye,
Lining yourself up for a game of Pool,
Getting a berth in the snug,
The perilous journey of stout
From pump to table
It was our wee melting pot
Miraculously stirred
No strangers here
Only people you had not yet
Tapped for a pint..

Meat wagon

2011-06-27T15:04:00.000-07:00

My father kick-started
A dead man with the heel of his shoe
And swore to me, in drink, he once
Got a mad woman out of a tree
By firing windfall apples at her
He was half-deafened with blasts
And if you set him up with
A glass of Guinness and a bush
He might let on darkly about
The wounds in his head from
Collecting bits of people in bags
Or happier times when an Emergency
Meant being too full of plum poitin
To keep his ambulance between the hedges
After a well-lubricated false alarm
Way out in the never-never
God knew, a while of his crack
Blunted trauma far better
Than any sterile diagnosis
His compassion had no side
He'd seen the similarity of passing souls
Whatever foot they kicked with in life
There were no atheists in the back
Where in his humble way
He held everyone sacred

Motes and Planks

2011-06-24T09:15:00.000-07:00

The trouble with badnesss
Is there's just too much of it
To go around.
The bitter juice we made
Was squeezed out
Around these shapely drumlins
The excess pooling, stagnating
And still occasionally sipped
By your neighbours
Who, fair play to them
Would never see you stuck
If your Massey broke down
Or if, misjudging the weather
You needed the silage in quick
But who,
When push came to shove here, long ago
Turned a blind eye
(Maybe bruised shut)
To the causes and effect
Of townland assassination
To the covert decisions
On life and death
Your kin were subject to
For merely staying put
The busy mandate of peace
Intruding on these parts
Where much was observed
But nothing altered
Is rightly cautious -
Stepping lightly over sacred ground
Looking for a hand to grasp
To make things right again.
You'd take it just to square things
With the man upstairs
But the man next door?
That's another story.

This is not a checkpoint

2011-06-21T02:32:00.000-07:00

You'd come across farmers sons
You went to school with
On the back roads at dusk
Looking to park up somewhere quiet
With your first Convent lassie
A blur of camouflage
The circle of dim red light
And you'd draw up to some fella
Locked and loaded
You once dead-legged in the playground
You were both playing new roles
He had his licence to kill
You just had your licence
The idea was to be civil -
Men of the world
But your girl flinched violently
Giving the game away
And it made you suddenly ashamed
Knowing in the dirty wash of sidelights
It might have been a different story
If she'd been there on her own
Without the thin orange cover of your
'respectability'
There's an awkward moment
When you try to read his opinion
Hating yourself for doing it
And, for forms sake
He pretends to check your details
You're let through, of course
Still a friend of the state
Despite your exotic tastes
You give a weak salute
As you spot your old art teacher
Prone on the verge
Covering you with a
General purpose machine gun
Like the subject of his own Magritte
The surreal picture
Now framed in your back window
Is consumed by the pink folds of twilight
The legacy remains -
An unwelcome passenger
A big, sour lump of indigestible history
Sprawled across the back seat
You thought you'd be playing on later
She is silent, for a time, then:
'Sorry. This isn't going to work.'

Ambush

2011-06-17T04:03:00.000-07:00

Lost in a forest of legs
Beneath the homely ceiling
Of damp green serge and fag smoke
A girl looks for her father
He went out this morning
Bad tempered at the rain
Late for his own funeral
But real enough, at least
As she lay in her bed's warm nest.
Later, while she ate her cornflakes
Still weak with sleep
A mile away between dripping ditches
He was rubbed out of the picture
To make room for a new Ireland
The muffled percussion of bullets
Lifted a few starlings
Who were keeping their feet warm
On telephone wires
That would presently hum with shock
Later when raised up to wet eyes
To be cursed with truth
There fell on her a type of madness
Scrabbling furiously for a gap
In the hateful logic of the wake
She transmits impotent love
Unsaid, undone, undying
Receiving no signal in return

Physio

2011-06-13T07:57:00.000-07:00

Here is your man with the healing hands
Playing slap and tickle
With all the uncooked meat remaining
The meagre contents of the surgeon's purse:
Puckered, raw and stupid at the ends
His goal is animated rage
The method brutal kindness
Frank manipulation
The starved cheer of the military ward
Is no match for his mechanical wit
'Aha!' He cries, cracking his knuckles
'We have ways of making you walk!'

Last Post

2011-06-11T07:54:00.000-07:00

Climbing Benaughlin
On a curling bog road

The starlight blanched

By cement works down below

Farting out aggregate 24/7

We passed a low stone shelf
Erupting from the peat

Flecked with the detritus

Of a visiting regiment's supper

The mysterious no-name biscuits

A fiddly little tin opener

Some warm fragments of hexamine

That recently fired a squaddy brew

A single boiled sweet, wrapped

Already mobbed by wood ants

These military artefacts

Are made incongruous

By their proximity to a red post box

The mail still Royal in this district

If nothing else

You could have your wee war here,

Wait for that red van

And write home about it by return

The solid truth of a letter

Your own careful legend

Having much more shape

Than the facts on the ground

Cenotaph

2011-06-06T06:20:00.000-07:00

Men on stone blocks
Revealed to us annually
In the midst of traffic
The corner boys of public space
Stepping out of unconscious precincts
Vert-de-gris warriors
Reduced to mere staging posts
In our fealty to the here and now
The invisibilty grates for a moment
But how could we ordinarily bear
Such constant presence of loss?
And so we ration our Glorious Dead
One brief life after another.

The Walk

2011-06-06T05:58:00.000-07:00

A hollow box of day-glo Peelers:
This unlikely lining
Holding the brethern snug within.
Mustered by the public toilet
A municipal bouquet
Of piss and shit and disinfectant
Pervades the porous night air
Seeming to mock any wholesome intent.
The Sergeant, hoping for rain and overtime
Sends the Lodge off up the brae
There's no music allowed
Nothing to set the pace
A blackthorn stick clatters down
The thin procession shivers
As an old man finds his feet again
This plantation town has switched sides
The war memorial, their destination
Is now held hostage by demography
Someone from the sullen, watching crowd
Begins a protest song, then stops abruptly
As if to recognise the irony
Of what is being overcome.

In the Maze

2011-05-26T08:36:00.000-07:00

The Gatelodge camera's pitiless eye
Watches the next meal of colour
Slide into this monochrome maw
Another morsel of humanity
Hard humoured, defiantly pliant
Will be processed, digested
Gradually rendered down
Then carried along a barred gullet
Marinated in captivity's reek -
A miasma of old sweat and stale tea
(With odd notes of something worse)
To finally stick in the craw
Of our rancid little history:
The prison visits room -
A cockpit of menace and scabbed cheer
Where anything can happen and often doesn't
Guards and guarded discreetly scrap
For crumbs of power
Each side incessantly off-balance
The weirdly vague attentiveness of staff
Is a half-hearted play on omniscience
Trying to see everything relevant
To getting home safe
Without seeing too bloody much
Everyone is doing time here
Where it is nearly always
Thirteen O'Clock

Inreach

2011-05-20T14:08:00.000-07:00

There’s no gain in sitting

By a dry Fountain

Purporting love

If the plumbing’s fucked

Or getting a up a warm blaze

In the cold ashes

Of cherished farmsteads

Forgiveness demands

A down payment

Bigger than that.

Washing the feet of those

Not yet able to put them

In your basin of blood

Would be a better start

Or else inclusion
Is just a delusion.

Aghalane bridge

2011-05-20T05:01:00.000-07:00

Artemis met Kratos
On the back road to Belturbet
The consequence of victory:
A brutal amputation.
The ancient stone limb
Once stretched across a river
Now roughly cauterised at either end
Granite fists still hold fast to each opposing bank
And in between?
A delaying void
A collapsing fear
An obstacle course for brown trout
An outrage
Like flowers in the mouth of a corpse
A way to turn away
And mind your own bloody business

Closed border barracks 2009

2011-05-20T02:08:00.000-07:00

This is a feral place

Once implacable but quickly humbled

By the higher ordinance of nature

The roll of honour has been unscrewed

And then supplanted by another

Fushia, escallonia, hebes and whitethorn

A lush and careless memorial

Climbing the blast walls, lacing the wire

Embracing cameras bowed and blind

You could pull it all down tomorrow

But you'd never settle accounts

As well as bindweed, couch grass, mares tail

The natives who prevail against us all.

Wheaten

2011-05-19T03:31:00.000-07:00

A swift slap on its tin backside
And a new loaf is delivered
On the scullery table
My mother, the creator
Having swaddled it in dishcloths
Murders it swiftly with her knife
Releasing the hot, sour breath
So redolent of childhood
I love the way new bread
Sucks butter off the blade
And stops time in a country kitchen

Brogues

2011-05-19T03:23:00.000-07:00

Daddy's brogues sat in a corner
Freshly painted with Oxblood
He wore them like statements
Well heeled. Solid. Tough
But I saw violence in their thick, pitted skins
With the tips glittering like gypsies teeth
They were like big, ignorant dogs
Better left outdoors
They stayed their ground, though
And growled at Daddy's slippers.

Part-timers

2011-05-18T07:12:00.000-07:00

This is my neighbours field
And, today, my battleground
We take the path of most resistance
Fading into a stand of Hazel
Going to ground in a humid understory
Of bilberry and honeysuckle.
Two white hares dance across my gunsight
Then leap a drainage ditch
Into the safety of the Free State
We've been here too long already
A brattle of thunder gives us cover to move
And sudden wind flattens the meadow
Exposing its pale, thick mane
The grass is good
There'll be a second cut th'year
On my own plot
If I live to see the end of it.

The land cries

2011-05-18T06:23:00.000-07:00

When God painted Ireland,
He used watercolours,
Smudging the dun, sodden landscape
With occasional sunshine.
This wringing wet romance
Seeps down through quiet churchyards
To feed lonely streams where soldiers drank
Scanning Heather ridges riddled
With the possibility of sudden death
I looked down at Lough Erne
Through the shining, murderous hillocks
Is that where all this water goes?
Washing the clay clean to Enniskillen.
It's a pity spilled blood
Can't be got rid of as quickly.

First published Independent 1992