"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.
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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:
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.
