Dubbalin Town

O, Dublin, sweet and slow,
I come and go
up and down your cobbled streets,
as the rain, insistent,
beats down upon the lights,
and throws an orange fuzzy sheen
over half-seen sights,
the places I have been.
So near and yet so far:
Grafton Street, Stephen’s Green,
the Coombe and Temple Bar,
the shadows on the Traitors’ Gate.
Crowds of loud young English
shout and laugh, then urinate,
without shame, here on the street,
beside the peagreen Liffey
(sweet Anna Livia Plurabelle);
ah well, at least they’re not in uniform,
and it's worse we’ve seen before,
insurrection, pestilence, famine, war:
such a fine collection of bullet holes
in our central city monuments.

So let the hen parties heave their guts out
on the raincold cobbles:
let them stagger home and say,
what a wild time we had in Dublin!
Let them come back in ten years or so,
with their fourth or fifth bloke,
and with all their kids in tow;
let them have another drink, a smoke,
perhaps they'll have some peace,
(for peace comes dropping slow)
and echo the words of the poet MacNeice:
This never was my town,
I was not born or bred
Nor schooled here and she will not
Have me alive or dead
But yet she holds my mind
With her seedy elegance,
With her gentle veils of rain
And all her ghosts that walk
And all that hide behind
Her Georgian facades -
The catcalls and the pain,
The glamour of her squalor,
The bravado of her talk.

Sweeney’s the chemist,
where Bloom forgot Molly’s lotion,
is still in Lincoln Place;
and so is the old post office
down on Westland Row:
O you naughty naughty boy!
I do not like that other world.
And please will you tell me
what perfume does your wife wear?
Bloom smell-sipped his glass of burgundy
at Davy Byrne’s, on Duke Street,
a disappointing place these days,
so gentrified. I well remember
how one of the old barmen
was kill’t telling me how Joyce, yer man,
would be writing away at the back table,
dat filthy buik, Allergies, or wha’ever.
Ah, would you fuck off, says I.
Yeh bleedin bowzy, says he,
I took yeh for a fuckin Yank.

Come to Amazing Tourist Dublin!
Stay at our three-and-a-half star hotels;
eat like a pig, drink like a fish,
and lumber along
our lazy languorous streets.

Buy things!

On your ambling aisy rambles
you can squint up the arses,
the cool marble behinds,
of female statues
at our staid and steady National Museum.
Bloom did, our wandering Jew,
so too can you.
No money, honey;
but even stone hearts slowly melt,
so smile, unbuckle your belt,
make a voluntary contribution!
Oops, sorry, Yanks,
no dollars, thanks,
there’s an exchange-rate
revolution: the … the ingratitude!
(but we were neutral in the Second War).
Hang on to your cash, you’ll need it!
Are ye jokin’ or wha’? indeed it
does seem strange, no proper answer
like a dropkick in the balls
from a weedy ballet dancer.

We still stack up the dead
next to my grandfathers,
maiden aunts, cousins and uncles,
in the wild sprawl of Glasnevin.
Poor poor Paddy Dignam!
(“No home is complete
without Plumtree’s Potted Meat”).
Poor dear betrayed Parnell.
O’Donovan Rossa.
O’Connell.
Collins.
Ah, Michael …
Macushla! … cut down at thirty-one,
our greatest chieftain since O’Neill!
Cut down, I might add,
by one of our own.
Why do we do this?
Ask Jonathan (Gulliver) Swift
who suggested, politely,
that the English should eat Irish babies,
help with the balance of payments,
and reduce the population.
England thought he was serious,
and so did some of the Irish.
“Where can I sell me baby, sorr?”
Well, without you, Michael,
we’d be prancing around the world
on British passports.

Yerra, Carolan!
Tabhair dom do lamh.*
Give us an oul’ song!

Up on the flinty North Side,
Drumcondra, Marino, Whitehall,
sits my old local, The Goose,
just there by Sion Hill;
I’d be away three years, maybe more,
then I'd stroll into the gaff,
and the lads’d say, where ya been?
Japan. O yeah? Me, I went to Benidorm,
two weeks with the new girlfriend,
fuckin magic! Right, it's my round,
then we’d talk and sing and laugh.
Sometimes An Taoiseach lounges in,
good old Bertie himself, backed up
by hard-looking thugs. “Yo!” says I,
“is it the Prime Minister or his bleedin twin?”
“Ah, Malachy!” says he, priding himself
on his memory for names, a head like tin.
“No,” says I, “isn’t it me myself?”
“O, Jayz, the astronomer … the geographer,
or was it the stamp collector?”
“B-b-b-bertie! You got it in one!”
After that, a pint, a good long chat,
here at “home” in Dublin North:
he may be the grand prime minister,
but he knows where his home is at.

On Bridge Street, down by the City Walls,
sits an ancient pub, the “Brazen Head”,
and many a time and oft have I lingered,
langered, within its stout-built chambers:
this is the oldest pub in Dublin, 1198.
About fifty yards away is the bridge,
the – ‘Atha Cliath’ – the Ford of the Hurdles
from which the city takes its name,
just a river crossing on the ‘Sli Cualann’,
one of the five ancient roads of Ireland,
the path from Tara to Glendalough.
That goes to explain the licence plates:
we are the citizens of “Baile Atha Cliath”,
and “Dubh-Linn”, which is also Irish,
is not where we live at all.

In the mean little streets near Christchurch,
winding and awkward to this day,
a government spy called Major Sirr
cornered the rebel Lord Fitzgerald,
and got himself stabbed for his pains.
Thirty-odd thousand died that year, 1798;
thousands more were transported
in creaking hulks to Australia,
a faraway prison for undesirables,
a new continent to slowly transform:
America was to come later.
God saved Ireland with America.
Not many long years before,
The Mad Dean of Saint Patrick’s,
(the cathedral looms just down the road)
that entrepreneur, that pamphleteer,
that purveyor of roasted Irish babies,
was laid at last to rest, his epitaph
fairly bounces off the wall:
Hic depositum est corpus
JONATHAN SWIFT S.T.D.
Huyus Ecclesiae Cathedralis
Decani
Ubi saeva indignatio
Ulterius
Cor lacerare nequit
Abi Viator
Et imitare, si poteris
Strenuum pro virili
Libertatis Vindicatorem **

God, it’s an old country,
but the weight comes down like a feather.
Nothing seems heavy, all drops down so lightly.
Freedom. Freedom, more than any other thing,
is central. You can go back through
all the old stories, the legends, the epics,
the Annals of the Four Masters, local histories,
you can listen to the voices of the rebels,
all those who fought and died,
four hundred, two hundred, one hundred years ago,
right on down to recent times,
and you sense this will never change,
you know this will never change.

All the tubby little accountants,
the cross-looking women in large automobiles,
the fierce young sporting men,
the giggling schoolgirls,
the languid poets and philosophers,
the businessmen in suits,
the regulars in the pubs,
the girl secretaries,
the skangers and headbangers,
the bus drivers,
the radio and TV executives,
the Nigerians, the Chinese,
the actors, the musicians,
the polite young Poles,
the flower sellers,
the asylum seekers,
the Spanish students

can gather in the streets, burn down embassies.

Ancient city of an ancient land,
ringed right round by the ocean sea;
great powers may rise and fall around us,
and do as they will, just leave us be.

-------------------------------------------
Brief notes:

- “Dublin” by Louis MacNeice

-- Turlough O’Carolan, blind harper (1670-1738). The title of this composition is “Give Me Your Hand” in English.

-- Bertie Ahern, Irish PM (An Taoiseach – The Leader)

-- The Brazen Head Pub homepage

-- “Dubh-Linn” translates as Black-Pool, the remains of which (now drained) can be seen behind Dublin Castle.

-- Swift’s epitaph, translated from the Latin by W.B. Yeats:

Swift has sailed into his rest.
Savage indignation there
cannot lacerate his breast.
Imitate him if you dare,
world-besotted traveller.
He served human liberty.




-- Annals of the Four Masters Irish chronicles, ca. 2000 BC - 1616 AD.

The Dark Ungentle Art of Murder

Love and death, possessing and killing,
Are the dark foundations of the human soul.
-- Emile Zola

O happy snappy little prole
Sign yourself upon the dole.
Go out on Friday, Saturday night,
And get yourself into a fight.
Smash the bloke who spills your drink,
Go with feelings, never think.
A pint glass is the warrior’s cup,
So chase the girls and knock ‘em up.
Social Services, police?
Wind ‘em up and never cease.
Football’s the modern field of battle,
So go in with your mates and rattle
Their cages. Towering rages
Make you a man among men!
And then, in a short while, when
Sadly you end up on a slab,
Sliced and diced by Dr. McNab
At the age of twenty, twenty-one,
You’ll have fought and you’ll have won
You little tit, your little bit
In restoring dear old Britain
To things that once were written
By poets and sages
About the Dark Ages.

John MacDonald found a corpse, put it under the sofa,
Waited till it came to life and hit it with a poker,
Sold its eyes for souvenirs, sold its blood for whisky,
Kept its bones for dumb-bells to use when he was fifty *.

George Tremayne was a man of fame
Well known in local parts;
He smiled and broke the young girls’ hearts,
But then broke one too many:
He seduced my sister Jenny.
Now George lies deep in the earth beneath,
I was grave and polite; I sent a wreath.

Unfriendly friendly universe,
I pack your stars into my purse

A weak cheer for our weary warriors
As they tread their hard way home;
Dispensers of Death, and yet,
It was through no wish of their own.
They are eager for love once more,
For simple acceptance; no foreign shore
Of unburied corpses, nor stink of war;
Eager to return to placid streams,
To ignore their dark unsettled dreams
And live as once they lived before.
But every man who was there can say
It never quite works out that way.
They need sweet sleep so badly,
And have no further wish to fight;
They would return their medals gladly,
For just one dreamless, peaceful night.

Every desire is a fear, every fear is a desire.

Doctor Mortimer duly arrived from Devon
On that clear September morning.
Holmes and I had had warning
But nothing under the canopy of Heaven
Could have prepared us for the Tale he told.
That Hound from Hell upon the Moors!

Heave aboot, ye Knaves and Hoors,
And roll them spittin’ cannons out!
Take aim, amidships, wait for the shout,
And dream on gold and jewels.

She would not think him half so cruel
Were she smiling prettily before him now
Instead of mouldering in the tomb;
Alive, at first, but with no room,
So very little room to move,
But time to think, before she died,
Of the earth and stones above her.
He had long since ceased to love her,
And arranged it all; if only to prove
The art of murder should best be applied
To enhance the fear of approaching doom.
Her fingernails torn to shreds, he imagines.
The darkness, the solitude, the weight:
Calculations of his cold dark hate.

He’s alive, he’s fuckin faking!
Chak ….. Chakka - Chak
Well, he’s f---in dead now.
-- US Marines, Fallujah 2004

Here’s a cracking new idea:
You ready?
- She’s a blonde/ brunette/ a redhead
- She’s young and sexy
- She’s got a filthy rich husband
- He’s old and fat
- She likes you
- She makes passionate love to you
- She says she adores you
- She wants you, needs you, etc.
- She begs you to kill her husband
- She’ll inherit the money
- You’ll wait until things cool down
- You’ll “meet”, you’ll get married
- You’ll live happily ever after

Me, I was in the Boy Scouts
So I know a thing or two,
( a couple of years in the Army as well,
but, truth to tell, Scouts is all you need
to learn depravity, get up to speed)
So this is what I’ll say to you:
She’ll be sitting on a sunny beach,
Out of call and out of reach,
Cuddling with her personal banker
While you, you trusting silly wanker,
Will be sprawled out at your leisure,
Doing 20 years at Her Majesty’s pleasure.

Dreamsister, dream once more of me
And I will sleepily dream of thee;
It is only in dreams my life has meaning,
When I hear you calling, softly keening.

Inchigeelagh.

My love and my mate
That I never thought dead
Till your horse came to me
With bridle trailing,
All blood from forehead
To polished saddle
Where you should be,
Either sitting or standing;
I gave one leap to the threshold,
A second to the gate,
A third upon its back.
I clapped my hands,
And off at a gallop;
I never lingered
Till I found you lying
By a little furze-bush
Without pope or bishop
Or priest or cleric
One prayer to whisper
But an old, old woman,
And her cloak about you,
And your blood in torrents –
Art O’Leary –
I did not wipe it off,
I drank it from my palms. **

Yuri Andeeivich Kostolenko
Is an ordinary Russian (Ukrainian) thug,
Wears a leather jacket, shades, a gold rolex,
And if you ask him he might shrug and flex
His muscular beefy arms, perhaps display
His shrapnel scars, the weird tattoos
He got when he and his mate Sergei
Were high as kites and on the booze
With Spetznatz in Afghanistan; Yuri smiles
And gazes three, four thousand miles.
He leaves this world behind. He is not unkind
To animals and little children, not on purpose,
But he will chop off your fingers with a cleaver,
Extract your teeth with pliers, connect live wires
To sensitive parts, or blandly stick a telephone receiver
Up your arse or down your throat. No use talking.
Yuri never listens: Dollars or Euros do the walking.
War was a game; this, the same: Bizzinez is Bizzinez.

Sobibor survivors testified at the trial that Stangl used to ride into the camp and attend ‘selections’ dressed in a white riding habit. ‘How could you go to the camp in that get-up?’ ‘The roads were very bad,’ he replied. ‘Riding was really the best mode of transport.’ I tried once more. ‘Yes, but to attend the unloading of these people who were about to die in a white riding habit …?’ ‘It was hot,’ he said.
-- Gitta Sereny interview with Franz Stangl, ex-SS commandant of Sobibor.

The clouds come drifting from west to east,
Other days they drift from east to west;
Armies come with them from both directions,
Not once, not twice, but many times:
Russia, Germany; and also, Sweden and Austria,
For sometimes the wind blows north and south.
You wouldn’t want to be a simple peasant
Exposed on this martial gathering ground;
And you really wouldn’t want to be a Jew,
Not if you knew what was good for you.

The autumn of ’39 came in like a thunderclap.

It was more, this time, than foreign uniforms,
Some new king squeezing the land for tax,
Much more, so very much more than that:
A half-cocked racial theory had landed.
Auschwitz – Oswiecim – sums it up for us now,
But many survived Auschwitz, hardly any survived
Maidenek … Sobibor … Chelmno … Treblinka.
The utter disgrace of Europe, of historical mankind,
Begins with the philosophes of Enlightened Paris
And ends, logically, in the killing sheds of Poland.

My job
Was to do what I was told.

And this is just totally unacceptable.
This is not only bad, it is wrong.
One of the real reasons we hate the Nazis …
Dislike the Germans, in fact, since Caesar’s time,
A people arrogant in victory, abject in defeat;
Either at your throat, or kissing your feet …
Is their planned, industrial approach to murder,
Their cold inhuman efficiency.

They make the rest of us look stupid

Or rather, make us look good by default:
We prefer to kill in the heat of the moment,
Or when we feel tired, upset, disgruntled,
Or because we received a shitty letter from home,
Or a lot of the time, too much of the time,
Because we are drunk.
Then we just want to forget all about it –
Come home to those placid streams,

Block out bad dreams.

But we rarely feel bad when our victims are unseen,
When there’s no personal memory of where we’ve been
Or of what we’ve done; we can drop a kiloton
Of bombs with mad persistence; from a distance
The blood and ruins, the scattered body parts,
Leave no scars upon our hearts.

We trained very hard for this mission and we knew what we had to do. When we pulled away from the target we were lifted up by a shock wave, and I knew in that moment that the mission was successful … When I looked down, what I saw was an area of roiling tar where before there was a city. Do I have any feelings of guilt? Well, I knew there were human beings down there and I felt sorry for them, but we were sent out to do a job and we did it. That’s the deal. Anyway, if it hadn’t been me somebody else would have done it.
-- Colonel Tibbets, commander of the ‘Enola Gay’.

Somebody else would have done it.
I suppose Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, could have said the same.
So could ‘Bomber Harris’, Dark Angel of Dresden.
So could so many others.

I think it’s a miracle to have made it this far,
All things considered. And also you, my friend,
Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,
—Hypocrite lecteur, —mon semblable, —mon frère!
Thank God (!) for the common sense of the Soviets,
Which is not quite as silly as is it sounds,
When one thinks of the people on ‘Our Side’.

O, God, sweet Mary Jane,
I saw you coming down the lane –
Smoke without fire.
We shall lie within a silken room
In Sidon or in royal Tyre,
Or if you will
In Notting Hill,
Wherever you desire.

Love, reign on me!
Reign over us all.

The man wanted for killing a British woman in a Tokyo flat had charmed her by sketching her portrait, police in Japan have said. Lindsay Hawker was beaten, stripped then strangled before being buried in a bathtub of sand, they added. It also emerged that chief suspect Tatsuyo Ishihashi had been warned in the past over claims he had stalked a young woman. Miss Hawker’s naked body was found in Ishihashi’s apartment on Monday.***

Japan is a doddle, so safe and so wonderful, so polite,
You just walk around in a daze of incomprehension
For the first few months; then the reaction kicks in
And you start to hate the place, since you think the locals
Are having a laugh at you, which, to be honest, they are,
And then it doesn’t matter because you hit your second wind,
And then you start to understand bits of the language,
And then you start to actually speak it a bit, which means
You meet all kinds of interesting new people, and, by then
My friend, you are hooked. You go home on holidays, sure,
But you always want to come back. It’s not exotic, like Thailand;
It’s totally straight down the line but like some other planet.
Imagine they wear a watch showing twenty-five hours in a day
And you are stuck with the good old traditional twenty-four;
So you are in line for some of the time, sometimes minutes away,
But never completely in synch. Yes, well, that’s my take on Japan.
They know exactly what’s going down and you don’t have a clue.
Some people freak and run home; the oddballs kind of like it.

Poor young Lindsay. What happened you?
Where was the back-up, the gaijin friends?
Can’t tell you the number of times when this rash poet,
Soi-disant, befuddled, s-s-s-slightly discombobulated,
Discerned menacing shadows perhaps closing in,
When a voice from the darkness called out,
‘Everything OK, mate? Put you in a taxi, orright?’
The moment of danger … if it was danger … is over.
So, Lindsay, what went down?
Where were your friends when you needed them?
Didn’t you know this geek meant trouble?
I will never know, and I can’t double-guess;
I never even knew you, and there are hundreds
Of girls like you, but none quite like you, and we didn’t
Even live in the same city, and so on and so on …
But I can tell you this, or tell your family,
That every gaijin guy in this country,
Surrounded by 125 million Japanese,
Hoards a nugget of shame, his share of the blame,
That we couldn’t do better,
That we couldn’t protect you.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Brief Notes and Links

* Extract from Bagpipe Music by Louis MacNeice.
** Extract from Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoghaire (The Lament for Art O’Leary)
*** The Lindsay Hawker case


There are some other short, usually italicized, quotes from Edwin Muir, James Fenton, Charles Baudelaire and The Who. For better or worse, everything else is my own.

Mr. Drew Wears Armani

At night, barefoot, on the stony tracks
the roots and the rocks would cut your feet
and you'd come home bleeding, angry,
and prepare for the next time. It went
on and on forever, there in the hills,
down by Cuil Aodha and Gougane Barra.
Tell me the names of a thousand stars
and which of the leaves in the forest
can heal which illness, whether boiled or powdered,
placed in a poultice, eaten, or stuck up your arse.
Twenty years they said it would take, each year
the chance of getting thrown out, rejected,
and the weary shame of returning home.

Knowledge they knew was dangerous
and it was doled out in careful stages; nothing
was allowed to be written; pens and parchment
were things we never saw. Memorise all we tell you
or tomorrow we send you home. In the beginning
it was nigh impossible, but then it became easier,
and our eyes began to see brighter colours,
our ears could hear the mice in faraway barns
and the trout singing softly in the lake,
and we were not asleep even when sleeping;
our teachers slowly, gradually, became less stern
and we knew then we would not be sent home
for us there could be no other home, not then.

Two thousand years later, give or take,
I step off the airplane at LA International
and wave my fingers at the Immigration flunkey
who immediately stamps my passport, blinking.
Out in the hot hazy sunlight I glide into a taxi
and I listen to the mangled Spanish of the driver
for a few minutes, then wave him into silence.
In Beverly Hills I ascend to the Penthouse Suite
obtained with a flutter of the fingers, I telephone
the production company shooting my next movie,
then descend, nattily casual, to the cavernous lobby.
I wave my fingers for an exquisite, well-cooked meal
and eye the elegant blonde sitting four tables over.

A charming little smile, another finger movement,
and she rises from her chair and instantly joins me;
having enjoyed the amenities in my palatial quarters,
I present her with three homemade 100 dollar bills,
far far better than the originals, and she kisses my toes
and bows herself backwards from the room. Ho hum.
Time to call the President, tell him what he's doing wrong,
and accept the usual excuses and apologies. Such a bore,
but one's gotta do what one's gotta do. I find that so true,
and one really needs to plan for the next thousand years.
Had I known in my youth things would end up like this
I might have had second thoughts, felt slightly remiss,
but one grows so used to this business with the fingers.

There is a lot to be said for an old-fashioned education.

fionnuala

down along by the riverrun bawdy
she sometimes leaves the lights on,
her window she opens a wee little crack
for to let the ghosts get in,
and to let the ghosts get back;

sometimes she leaves her lights on
all among surrounding seas of black,
and the ghosts float in and take their ease
late in the long and lonely nights,
her disembodied memories.

Ottoman

The red silken cord, for three long weeks,
lay coiled and hidden in the messenger's pouch.
Having struggled along rain-drenched muddy tracks,
crossed white swollen rivers, climbed over mountains,
he debouched, at last, on the plains of Hungary.
What news from the Light of the World?
croaked the stooping figure of Multan Pasha,
eyes aglitter in a face like mildewed parchment.
Wordlessly the messenger handed him the pouch,
and in silence Multan retired to his chamber
from which he never again would emerge.
-----------------------------------------

European officers facing disgrace and scandal favoured a bottle of whiskey and a loaded pistol; the Sultan simply sent a silken cord to the officials who displeased him.

Geoghan's Ghost

I.

Aequam memento rebus in arduis
seruare mentem, non secus in bonis
ab insolenti temperatam
laetitia, moriture Delli,
--- Horace, Odes, Book II, iii.

Geoghan tempers his moods of disquiet
with appeals to ancient personal gods,
pre-Christian, yes, that goes without saying,
but also pre-Celtic: he seems to gallop across
the millennia instead of a few mere centuries,
swearing or perhaps just furiously praying,
as he races to catch the 16A to Beaumont
with shoelaces undone and his long dark coat
wantonly flapping in the wind that whishes
and whooshes, aweela, wet from the slimegreen sea.
Geoghan invokes secret unheard of names and powers
that were hoary with age in the time of Baal
and Amon Ra; where has he learned these fearful
Stone Age imprecations? Surely not at home
with the mammy and daddy and his three sisters,
one of whom plays the harp and the other two
dainty violins, there in the plateglass bungalow
picked out from the All-Ireland Book of Designs
for Virtuously Vulgar Modern Living, garnished
with garden gnomes imported fresh from England,
Happy and Smiley, Doc and Dopey, Harold Wilson.
Geoghan’s oul fella was a turf accountant, as we say,
with our penchant these days for the gombeen genteel,
our building maintenance operators, our facilitators,
our elderly female recluses, kept well away from society
and formerly known as nuns; the priests, heaven help us,
are still in evidence, and you’ll find a fair few number
when fire alarms ring in the jollier parts of the city:
Come out there, Father, amn’t I holdin yer trousers?
Young Geoghan was never much good at manly sports,
at thumping others for the possession of a pig’s bladder
and then kicking it up and away like all our national teams
so that your heart could weep out of sheer frustration:
ah, would you pass or dribble, and not from yer bloody mouth?
But … but he had a steady sort of way about him,
not at all what you’d expect at the Christian Brothers
where they’d be beating away all that shite and nonsense
the minute you’d look up to stare in their dark flushed faces;
the fact is, they could feel something; and they were afraid of him,
not that at first I felt the same myself; no, that was later
when he’d look at me with those strange sea-washed eyes,
grey-green, pebbly, distant, unspeakably cold and old,
and it was then you’d feel the odd involuntary shiver
and would offer a joke or a beer, anything to break the tension.
Well, he died, of course, our poor unknowable friend,
and it is the matter of his end I wish to speak of.

II.

Inde fit ut raro, qui se vixisse beatum
dicat et exacto contentus tempore vita
cedat uti conviva satur, reperire queamus.
-- Horace, Satires, Book I, i.

It’s only now I’ve decided to break my long silence;
I was afraid, quite frankly, of powers I could not control,
and I didn’t have the protection or belief of poor queer Geoghan.
I was brought up with the mumbo-jumbo of an executed god,
a new departure in religious thinking, when you stop to think,
for here’s a god who becomes the sacrifice, not the demanding recipient,
a god who says turn the other cheek and then does fuckall for you
Geoghan saw through all that. Let me tell you what happened.
He got it in his head, seriously, he could stop the war in Iraq
and so prayed for forty days and nights, each day with two bottles of wine
(red and white) just around the corner from Trinity at the Lincoln Inn,
then, his vigil over, he proceeded, ceremoniously, to forlorn Ballsbridge
and the rounded concrete fortress of the unlovely American Embassy.
There for a while he disappeared, and his nervous band of acolytes
(I was not among them) stubbed endless cigarettes on the grey pavements
and waited and waited and waited for a sign. None, of course, came.
After three days helicopters arose like dragonflies in the clapped-out
dishwatery mauve and filthy pink of a ho-hum Dublin dawn
and shots were fired, we heard them, and the Air Force was called out,
all three of our serviceable planes, they went sqwark … sqwark … sqwark
to each other on the radio, like demented parrots, and we could all hear them
on Radio One; overall, it wasn't a great day for Ireland’s Intrepid Airmen,
with the other two muppets cheering them on from the ground,
their oul’ airplanes wouldn’t kick over when they’d stuck in the keys.

O Kathleen Mavourneen, the grey dawn is breaking,
The horn of the hunter is heard on the hill;
The lark from her light wing the bright dew is shaking …

and so we hared over to Howth Head and Killiney, to the high ground,
to the two encircling, ensnaring arms of this fiercely possessive city,
and from there we could see it all, but what we saw can never be agreed.
The Americans … Irish military gunships? …tried to shut down the whole business
with their broken old record, their fee-fi-fo-fum of GWOT and Guantanamo,
but you might as well try to stop the tide as stop the Irish from talking,
although nobody (this happens a lot in Ireland) could quite agree. Only I could see
a strange awkward figure hovering, balancing there in the whooshing air,
his coattails flapping like the dark raven’s wings on Cuchulainn’s shoulder,
his mouth open in an O with a force of words that only I could hear
and yet barely make out, with the rush of the wind and the clatter of the blades,
and yet it sounded like … Hilatoth …Hilagath … Hilga .. Hilgamoth?
the sacred and doubtless secret name of a long-forgotten but unburied god,
and then Geoghan transposed into a flash of light and his form was gone forever.
No body was ever recovered. And the war in Iraq went on and on.