THE RED COAT

"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes
a revolutionary act." 

                   George Orwell

I was ten or twelve 

when my father told 

me to burn a good 

red coat.

That was Belfast
In the early seventies

so I did what
I was told

to this day it
has always niggled 

me why I had to burn
that coat.

My father is dead
and my sister
who was wearing

the coat she killed

herself and I think
this is why.

This was
the coat
that carried
the gun
that killed
the man?

A FOX THOUGHT

For Ted Hughes

 

I imagine a landscape of your poems:

A sacred wood, a pagan burial ground

Where the eyes of wildlife blood red

devour prey.  Surrounded by darkness

of gothic tales.  Cold moons fall on

a perpetual November sky.

 

Winter soil on your chalk white flesh

Deep in the womb of your savage earth.

 

The nonchalant delight of you toil, free

from the vulva noose.  That something

else is alive unseen, black velvet feathers

oiled in crude sway within black rainbows

And peck your birds-eye tomb vision.

 

Rain from a broken gutter spout, your poems

Gush with cold delight, the purification

Of a stagnant well.

 

 

touch the footplate floor and Dis-integrate day

dreams to become pomes. I'm surfing a see 

of black inkling.

 

 I rose like up like Napoleon's nose

Bursting from the earth of Cave-

hill, was this my Plato’s cave?

shimmering shadow down, shade

of strength to help me deal with

The trauma of a negative capability. 

 

My father interned, mother in Armagh

women's goal a rabble-rouser in a black      

     

beret, camouflaged with a Hurley bat 

singing: ’we shall not be moved just like 

a tree rooted by the waterside’. Peace

was always in her heart, she lives 

in my peace poems.

My sister in Middletown reform center

A wild child left to run the streets, my home 

was burnt to the ground in 69’. My syllables

ricochet off the gun battle road dragged  

through a hedge backward.

 

Froze in fear, pissed myself thrown over

The top into shellshock. Twelve gardens

he got me to my front door only to be

shot in the head.

 

 Red hair hands like shovels I carry his

memorial card etched into my mind.

I cried myself to sleep into stanzas

of peace poetry.

 

I should be one of the bitterest people

alive but I wrote this in 94’, an extract 

of unwritten graffiti:

A true descendant of Kevin Barry, whether

    true or not she was a rebel to me. Patty Keogh 

        from Rathmines Dublin my true force of

      volcanic true rock, she was my rebellious 

          streak on the smuggler's route Lylo 

                       Bluestone soiled.

Lost in a zoetrope of restricted vision

I thought the whole world was at war.

North Belfast, the flax street Mill no-

 more a web of Industrial revolution

But a homespun yarn.

 

This was war, Mill-It-tare-eyes

weaving blood and hated.

My world was cave-hill to Flax

Street ramps and barbed wire.

hatred was on the streets.

 

Spinning war-time propaganda

and we the people paid the price

 Loyalists/republicans both stabbed

and stabbed in the back.

 

 

Relevant even today the way for-

                   

                    ward is:

UNITY/IRELAND

 

We shall overcome someday like a tree

Standing by the water, civil rights

And civil wrongs. 

                  A poetic sedimentary Form.