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.

Gaius Caecilius Metellus

Part the First: In which G. Caecilius Metellus embarks upon a public career.

(These events take place between the consulships of L. Gellus and Cn. Cornelius Lentulus Clodianus and that of Q. Hortentius Hortalus and Q. Caecilius Metellus, that is to say, from the 681st to the 685th Year of the founding of Rome)

The envy of Peperna brought them low in the end;
too many drinks at a feast, a sudden flash of swords,
and in the passions born of burning jealousy,
the great general, Sertorius, was cruelly cut down.
I was then just a military tribune, rising nineteen,
under the command of my uncle, Metellus Pius;
when news of the murder made its way to our camp,
I was not the only young officer to sigh with relief.

Fighting in Spain had been harsh and unpleasant,
days of humping dry hills under a punishing sun;
lightning cavalry probes on our flanks, sudden panic,
dead companions, wounds, no trace of the enemy.
With the enemy Sertorius gone, we soon wrapped it up,
although my laconic Uncle Pius reddened with rage
when Pompey (the ‘Great’) stole away with the credit;
as for me, I was delighted at last to sail home.

Ah, Rome!

You have no idea what it’s like to be back in the city,
to walk again the crowded, cacophonous, colourful streets;
to stroll in the Forum, linger lazily in the baths,
eye the lovely scented and sultry depilated girls!
My father, cold and stern in the approved old manner,
tipped me out of bed at sunrise on the third morning;
‘Holiday over,’ he grunted, as we stood in the cold atrium,
face to face with ancestral masks, ‘time to get cracking.’

So farewell the smoky taverns, the louche companions!
I notice, when you stand in the Forum on election morning,
that the white powder that gleams on your snow-bright toga
rises in little puffs, gets up your nose and makes you sneeze.
There I was, poised uneasily, on the bottom lowly rung
of the steep and seemingly lifelong cursus honorum,
a narrow, overcrowded, and quite often lethal ladder
that might lead one day to the dizzy heights of Consul.

I could see friends grinning up from the surging crowds,
as battered bones still ached from the ordeals of Spain;
my father’s clients milled about full of fussy attentions,
with such a formidable family, I had little chance of losing.
Duly elected quaestor, I was assigned to the Treasury,
about the most boring job you could possibly imagine;
daily I put my seal on whole streams of arcane documents,
presented and removed by dour and efficient silent slaves.

The sheer monotony of this unchanging daily routine
very soon made me frantic with a sense of frustration;
I would slip away for the odd party or secret assignation,
but Boras, that bastard, would infallibly track me down.
Boras, ex-centurion, ex-primus pilus, far-too-loyal retainer,
son of a freedman who had once been slave to the family;
built from brick and scarred marble, doglike in his devotion,
he had no patience for ‘ softarse young pups on the town’.

In my experience, when your fortunes begin to sink low,
they have a way of descending into something far worse;
I’d only months left in the horrible job I’d been stuck with,
when Father announced yet another of his fine notions.
‘There you are, son,’ he boomed, ‘my, you do seem peaky!
‘I think it’s time we put a bloom on those pale pasty cheeks.’
O, gods, no, I thought, whatever this is, I really don’t want it!
‘I think it’s time,’ said the parent, ‘to think of your marriage.’

Boras, you evil old snitch, was my first conscious thought,
you ratted on my all-too-rare nights down in the Subura;
Boras’ eyes never once flickered in his long mahogany face,
so, then, I thought, it must be politics – isn't it always politics!
‘We need to steer a careful path,’ said Father, predictably,
‘between the remaining old supporters of Marius and Sulla ;
‘the family is not all that badly placed, but this could change,
‘we need to consider these rising men, Pompey and Crassus.

‘We connect with Pompey through your cousin,’ he continued,
‘But Crassus has no daughters!’ I cried out, without thinking;
this earned a frown from Father, an obelisk stare from Boras,
‘If you will allow me’, said Father, ‘I was thinking of the Julians’.
‘But this fellow Caesar is a scheming villain, all piss and vinegar!’
‘He may prove successful, and there's an unmarried daughter.’
My heart sank straight to my toes, like a heavy stone within me,
I knew all about young Julia, the ice-cold patrician princess.

I gazed blankly at my father, eyes heavy and dull with horror;
I felt transfixed, like one of the six thousand unfortunate slaves
that Crassus, not so long ago, had roped and nailed to crosses
and left to die, mile after mile of them all along the road to Rome.
‘Cheer up,’ said Father, ‘the betrothal is the thing, she is young.’
She is seven, I thought, which carries scheming a little too far.
‘We need to plan,’ he growled, ‘I command, and you will obey!’
Spain was first, then the Treasury, now this: I must get away.

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

- dates: approx. 72-69 BCE
- Sertorian War
- cursus honorarum: elected magistrates
- primus pilus: a sort of regimental sergeant-major
- Suburra: a working class red light district in ancient Rome

The Metelli were a prominent senatorial family, conservative in outlook, but determined to preserve the Roman Republic as they understood it. They produced an impressive number of consuls and military leaders but were ultimately unable to prevent a showdown between the dignified political obtuseness of Pompey and the the unscrupulous political brilliance of Caesar, both powerful ambitious men with large armies to call upon. In a real sense, military expansion (the growth of empire) destroyed the republic, a lesson from history to any imperial power that masquerades as a republic at home. See this article on the family

Part the Second: In which G. Caecilius Metellus abandons for a time his public career



(These events take place between the consulships of L. Caecillius Metellus and Q. Marcius Rex and those of L. Aurelius Cotta and L. Manlius Torquatus)

The quaestor’s job had been tiresome; now Father planned to marry me off,
and not just to anyone, either, he wished to forge an alliance with Caesar.
Much troubled, I went to seek advice from the celebrated M. Tullius Cicero,
whom I had watched, enthralled, during his masterly prosecution of Verres.
When I called on the great man, diffidently, his effusiveness surprised me,
but as a nobody from nowhere, he played up to the scions of older families.
I explained my awkward position and asked for the benefit of his thoughts:
‘Ah, dear impetuous youth,’ he sighed, then smugly intoned, ‘you must obey!’

I thanked him, strapped on my armour and breathlessly ran for the boats.
Quintus, another of my military uncles, had held out one chance of escape
before scheming Father, clutching my testicles, could approach wily Caesar
and offer my services, a sacrificial bull for Julia, his darling only daughter.
A fire-breathing response to what had been an offhand, half-hearted offer
visibly startled Uncle Quintus, this canny no-nonsense fleet commander;
as elder brother to Father, he was quick to understand the lie of the land,
and practically smacked his lips in composing a brusque and formal letter:

Hail, Brother! The People and Senate of Rome, in this hour of crisis,
look as ever to the bravery and fortitude of its young citizen officers,
among whom the fine young men of our family have always been …
Etc., etc.

We campaigned against the pirates of Crete, a bothersome nuisance,
and I found this to be refreshing, a form of violent outdoor exercise;
then, when an ill-planned raid went wrong, I received a slash across the guts
that came close to killing me, and for weeks I languished in some agony,
threatening to die if my worried uncle made an attempt to send me home.
Death passed me by with a whisper, but I knew it would find me in Rome
should I be connected to a woman that I cordially but intensely disliked,
and, more to the point, her ruthless father, who frankly terrified me!

I slipped ashore, a convalescent scholar, on sparkling peaceful Rhodes,
and applied to the school of Molon, former tutor to Cicero and Caesar;
‘Ordinarily, I wouldn’t do this,’ he said, accepting my lavish presents,
for he had cackled rudely at demonstrations of my "slow pedestrian mind”.
I wasn’t offended; I like the Greeks, they are subtle, quick and intelligent,
although incapable of practicalities, such as running their own country.
They make extremely useful slaves, unlike sluggish and belligerent Gauls,
and if you have the sense to flatter them, they can teach you a thing or two.

I took a liking to the local wines, and also to the habit of open discourse,
and was praised, I believe, as a mannerly young fellow, utterly un-Roman.
These were pleasant times, as the pirates faded entirely from view;
the task of clearing them I left to Uncle and, latterly, glory-seeking Pompey.
My father never ceased in his importunate efforts to summon me to Rome,
but well-paid local doctors sent him a series of discouraging reports.
Father recoiled with dread from any thoughts of ships or the sea,
thus I could laze to full recovery, attended by a pair of ravishing sisters.

I forget how long this leisurely life had lasted when it came to my notice
that young Roman visitors seemed to sport strange wispy little beards.
Romans have always been such a notoriously clean-shaven sort of people,
that I was intrigued by this change in fashion and sought these fellows out.
They spoke in reverent tones of some senator, a patrician named Catalina.
I had heard of him, of course, a grasping thug from one of the old families,
he had wilfully murdered for property at the time of Sulla’s proscriptions,
and, so it was said and believed, he had brutally murdered his very own son!

‘A great change will come to Rome,’ these young men were pleased to confide,
‘when all the landlords and lower-class moneylenders will meet their desserts;
'all the old families, the natural elite, will be restored to rightful power.’
Just so, thought I, calling for more wine, but what will Father make of all this?
Hardly a week had passed before his thoughts were forcefully made known.
A slave ran to my gate and delivered a letter from a ship newly docked:
‘Blast your silly wounds!’ it read. ‘Come back to Rome immediately!’
Father’s style, indubitably. Then: ‘I want you to befriend this man Catalina'.

Lillibulero

Lily strolls saucily down the street
with slow embarrassed pleasure;
so young and alive in her new cotton dress,
the young lads watch her at their leisure.

Fairview, the Strand, Newcomen Bridge,
hear the trams come clanging down;
Amiens Street rises right ahead,
where trains rattle in to Dublin town.

O Lily, Lily, me Dublin darlin'
Lily, Lily bulero!

Talbot Street, shadow of the rail bridge,
alive with a load of little shops;
the cries and chants of the old street traders,
the roar of this city never stops.

Walk ahead, Lily dear, to Nelson's Pillar,
one-handled hero in a silly stone hat;
you'll meet your young man at a smart new cake shop,
but you're not quite sure what will follow from that.

O Lily, Lily, me Dublin darlin'
Lily, Lily bulero!

Sure, I don't even know if he's keen on me,
says Lily, agiggle with girlfriends;
he's never even tried to hold my hand,
sweet Lily, Lily bulero!

Now gaily she glides along the Strand,
as greyly the day slides into night;
the young chap that day, he was keen all right,
begorrah, bedad, and begum ...

now he's me Dad, and Lily's me Mum!

----------------------------
(true story !)

An Clar

I like the craggy, weather-beaten
old men with nicotine stains
on their chapped knuckly fingers
and few remaining teeth. I like
the way they stare at you
with their faraway cynical blue eyes
and take you in, visibly unimpressed
with the ridiculous person you are.
I stand among them, occasionally
forgetting not to smile, nodding
my head sagely, losing the beat,
in my off-the-peg suit, my despicable tie.
They allow me the honour of infrequent speech,
spit, quite politely, to the side,
reserve judgement for the sake of my family,
then mutter, grimly, about the price of sheep.

history can kill you

photo by Alastair MacNaughton


coffee-coloured gentlemen
in a mish-mash
of dishdash and Western dress
saunter lazily among
the souks, twirling
prayer beads, car keys,
insouciant,
descended, in part,
from the bashi bazouk
of the Ottoman day,
men without pay, and beaten
like dogs, who unleashed
great fortunes in plunder,
with a bit of casual
relaxing rape on the side,
and went swaggering
along these same narrow
twisting lanes, twirling
severed human heads.

ahh, the good old days

they have been going on,
these good old days,
for quite some time:
Sargon of Akkad;
Tiglath-Pileser;
Darius and Xerxes:
Tamerlane, Saladin,
Saddam Hussein....




Mountains of skulls,
vast pyramids of burning bodies;
and from horizon to horizon
wailing wives and mothers.

Some optimist, occasionally,
marches in from outside,
some fool with visions of conquest:
Alexander, Crassus,
(these, and so many others)
and many leave their bones
strewn across the arid sands: these barren
sun-scorched lands have a habit
of sucking in armies
and draining them dry.

You win the first war rapidly, then slowly lose the second.

It was long before Allenby
entered Jerusalem, on foot,
(unlike the vainglorious
Kaiser before him),
that the European project
was foredoomed: foreign armies
bleed and die, win or lose a few battles,
then politics pulls them out.

Cheerio, Johnny Turk
Au ‘voir, les Bleus
Pip-pip Tommy Atkins


Only Israel remains,
an ideal, an imposed necessity;
a nation composed of hope
and tribal vengeance, thrust
into the heart of the Muslim World
like a poisoned dagger,
supported (glumly) overseas
by vague feelings of ignorance
and guilt.

Now come the Americans,
untroubled, as usual, by history,
obsessed by numbers, technology,
and firepower; unaware (as yet)
that they are losing, dangerously
out of tune with their surroundings,
unaware, also, that they are stranded
in the original killing fields
in the ancient killing fields
where there is tolerance for endless horror.

fifteen haiku

This is a total misnomer. I'm talking about the title. What we have here is a compilation of 7 senryuu (川柳) and 8 haiku (俳句). I leave it to your judgement to discern which is which. Traditionally, haiku tend to be elevated in tone, more in tune with nature and the passing seasons, whereas senryuu cast a wry and caustic look on human behaviour. Both use exactly the same 5-7-5 syllabic format.

------------------





1.

My private student
shyly exposes her breasts --
what do I do now?

------------------
2.

Millions of insects,
tiny transient tourists --
Japan in summer.

-------------------
3.

Two glasses of beer
and your face goes scarlet red --
school reunion.

--------------------
4.

Dripping ice-cream cones.
Each in summer kimono --
Five little girls.

---------------------
5.

At the funeral
my friend is gone forever
soft cold misty rain.

----------------------

This is not a quiz. It's just a bit of reflective fun. I realize looking at a whole row of haiku one after another gets a bit tiring. My Japanese friends tend to be rather strict in literary matters and would doubtless class all of the five above and the ten to follow as dubious senryuu. I'll tell you why below.

-----------------------
6.

Leaving the office
a whole day of black and white
bursts into colour

-----------------------
7.

at the festival
starlight shines upon your hair
only I can see.

________________
8.

Pale and unsmiling,
avoid like hell by daylight --
nightclub Russian girls.

----------------------
9.

Here comes Jonathan!
May a truck roll over him --
please please let me drive.

----------------------
10.

A life without love
avoids all complications,
leaves you dead and dry.

----------------------

Time for another break from the poems. They are only truly effective in isolation. A string of them rather dilutes their power and takes away their stand-alone presence, their "is"-ness, for want of a better term. My Japanese friends, to continue, believe that only pure poets can write haiku, which means, in effect, that the poet must be Japanese and will most certainly not write in English!! They do have a point. Modern haiku are sclerotic in the sense that they have been surrounded by an accumulation of so many subtle rules that they have become almost impossible to write by any normal non-expert Japanese, let alone a foreigner. This is pure nonsense, of course, as a glance at the great free-wheeling iconoclasts of the 17th century makes immediately apparent. Unpredictability and originality have since come to be discerned as dangerous and negative values in Japan, however, with the concomitant need to ruthlessly stamp them out wherever and whenever they occur in the interests of "Wa" -- national harmony. Hence, to cut a rather interesting story short, the "taming" of haiku, along with everything and everyone else, including the ongoing failure of the educational system and the inability to deal with the iniquities of the imperial past.

-------------------------------
11.

Exploding fireworks --
love strikes at my heart again:
summer kimonos.

______________________
12.

Fanatic patriots,
all with the same half-dazed look --
Yasukuni Shrine.

______________________
13.

Late for work again!
Hurrying, jostle a blind girl,
I am so sorry.

------------------------------
14.

She tells me her name,
says it means "the holy child" --
no, I don't think so.

------------------------------
15.

Sake, more sake,
in cups of fresh-cut cedar --
ooh, the dancing moon!

-------------------------------

Well, I thought we'd never get to the end but we did. No more haiku from me for a while. See if you can separate them out into senryuu and haiku. Right, so. Good luck.

Just out of interest ... let me know if the Japanese characters below show up on your computer. They should. Doesn't mean they will.

じゃあ、皆さんこれで終わりにしましょうか
気を付けて家に帰て下さい
近いうちにまた話しましょう
Sayonara. さようなら

Jaa, minnasan, kore de owari ni shimashou ka?
Kiotsukete ie ni kaitte kudasai.
Chikai uchi ni mata hanashimashou.

Right, everyone, let's finish up here, OK?
Safe home (well, you're probably there already)
Let's talk again soon.
Good-bye.

Ireland in October

The rain spatters
violently, ineffectually,
against the double-glazed windows;
we pull across the curtains
as the evening draws in,
place a few more sods of peat
on the flames of the growling,
crackling fire, then nurse
our drams of single malt.
The whiskey gleams golden
in the Waterford tumblers
as we listen to (yet half ignore)
the shrieks and whistles
of the wild Atlantic winds.

I don't know, says Uncle Liam,
how much of this you understand.

Upstairs
in this whitewashed cottage,
planted, perhaps perversely,
on the farthest edge
of nearly nowhere,
sits a four-poster bed
with sagging springs
in a large cold room
no longer used nor visited;
it is occupied now
by dust and sepia photographs,
but it was in this room
that long dead newlyweds
began the slow
inevitable genesis
of unresolved tragedy.

The lashing rain, the heartless winds,
deride our humanity;
now as in times past,
and in the coming times to be,
they mock our hopes,
our aspirations,
our nationality.

Turbulence, pain, famine, grief.

On the bedroom wall,
housed in an ancient frame,
is a faded stitching sampler:
"God Bless Our Happy Home",
piously, if uncertainly,
accomplished with her own hands
by Emily May MacCarthy
on October 20, 1843,
the fifth of eleven children
and one of the seven
who starved to death
along with her despairing parents.

In the photographs, dapper
gentlemen with large moustaches
stare into an unforgiving lens
with comical expressions
of puzzled defiance;
they stand in front of studio
backdrops, and very
tasteful potted palms.
James Boyle Roche. Photographer.
15 Bridge Street. Ennis
is stamped within an oval
in the corner: the address
still exists, I went to have a look,
it is now a fast-food restaurant.

Wedding couples,
equally unrelaxed, stare
across a canyon of years:
I could not even begin
to talk to these people.
He sits, she stands,
and she places a tentative
restraining hand
upon his rigid manly shoulder.

There is another
strangely out-of-place picture
of my great-uncle Marteen Rua,
the red-haired boy,
shot dead in the civil war;
a cocky 19-year-old
with a cheeky grin,
he is brandishing
an enormous revolver
and has a jaunty cigarette
jutting from his lips.
I can tell from the look of him
we could have had a drink,
we could have had a talk,
he cuts through
all the lace-curtain piety,
the respectability,
the fear: he looks
so devil-me-care, so modern.

But the rain will have none of it:
it comes down in buckets,
it comes down in cascades;
You will never, you will never
never never be free, it says:
in this country you will never
never be released from the past.

Liam is uncharacteristically
subdued; embarrassed, he shifts
from foot to foot in front
of the warm and blazing fire.
We are warmed outside,
and inside, perceptibly,
thanks to the single malt.

Upstairs
there are more old photographs
on the dresser and on the sideboards:
cloche hats on smiling elegant women,
charabancs, baggy suits on the gents,
who grin and squint in the harsh sunlight
of long forgotten days, some of them sporting
those ridiculously shortened neckties:
my unknown, unknowable ancestors.

A flicker of empathy,
of understanding,
slips through
this threnody of regret.

Listen, I think I'm going to bed,
it's been a really long day, I say.
Liam frowns. An awkward
silence ensues: Emmmm ...
Listen to me. There's something
I really need to tell you.
It's about the family ....

Don't.

It will keep for another hundred years.

Inaka

Knee-deep in water
among the mountains
bend and rise
planting the rice seedlings
bend and rise
just like 500 years ago
under the same mountains
living in the same village
bend and rise.
My husband, she says,
doesn't write so well
but he is honest and strong
and our second son
surprised us all.
With a show of metal teeth,
the proud mother,
sun-darkened, shaded
under a conical coolie hat,
smiles like a young girl.
Her second son, she tells me,
goes to college in Tokyo.

----------------------

*Inaka (田舎) - out in the country, anathema to most urban cool young Japanese because that is exactly where their families came from ...

Afterlife

Welcome to the Afterlife --
so sorry you are dead, folks,
but if you would just step this way
we have some exciting
offers and options
and several "eternal" packages
which I am sure
you will find interesting
(my assistants very shortly
will hand out brochures).

Could the Jews
please leave your suitcases, undress
and go to the showers?
Just follow the guide.
You were right all along.
Congratulations.
Thank you, thank you,
just follow the guide
and ignore the dogs,
they rarely bite.

Now, Mormons,
over to my left, please,
so we can fit you up
for your robes and wings;
there's a bit of a cliff,
a precipice, actually,
but I can assure you
that the wings
generally work quite well.

Ahh, Muslims!
Will the men please move over
to the small stinking rooms
where you will remain
for the next seven centuries?
Ladies, into the garden
with these young lusty handsome chaps,
seven each, I believe,
who will fulfill
your every desire.
Yes, yes, of course
you can throw away the veils!

Namaste, Hindu friends!
Over there with the cows
and the monkeys, the elephants
and the kangaroos:
they all speak Railway English.
The Untouchables
(such a quaint endearing term)
will prepare your food
and look after you.

Protestants, oh dear!
We're not quite ready
so, if you wouldn't mind
please gallop along
to this cold drafty chapel
and sing tedious hymns
for the next 300 years
while we do our best
to get back to you.

Catholics, oh so many!
Right, Italians into the restaurant,
Irish and Poles into the pub,
Spaniards and Portuguese
onto the terrace, if you wouldn't mind,
and South Americans
into the carnival tents.
Chileans, if you please,
into the soccer stadium!

Right, who's left?
Pagans, atheists, New Age
California bunnies?
Pick up the brooms
and grab the mops
and clean up the area.
Enya is on Channel Four
on your headsets, the same song
for the next 400 years,
plus forest winds
and ocean waves
and birdsong.
Enjoy!

God is on a business trip
negotiating exchange rights
with Mr Lucifer
but should be back
by tea-time.
He will welcome you all
with a 3-year-long speech
upon his return.

We are negotiating with Hell
to get Fidel
when he drops off from the pod:
he can do the speeches instead of God.

Now we are all settled
and nothing remains to be said.
Aren't you all thrilled and excited
to know you are finally dead?

Unter die Wellen bleibt bei Dir mein Herz

Frau Elena Proschkow, 88, remembers her first husband, her abiding true love, Kapitan zur See Hans-Christian Meier, commander of the submarine U-263, lost at sea on November 9, 1942.





-------------------------------------------------------

O Christian
how it all comes back --
I can see you now
so young, so eager,
resplendent
in your tailored uniform,
your dark eyes gleaming,
your shy lovely smile,
and the proud glances of your father,
the apprehensive eyes of your mother,
and, there, both laughing and fearful,
little me, three months pregnant
with Johann, our firstborn,
the son you would never see.
Life can be so cruel.

I weep to remember;
I can see it all so clearly
even now, after sixty-four long years,
like a photograph, like an image
burned into my brain;
you, my darling husband,
you, the best of all men,
on the night before you went to sea
for the last time, never, never
to return to the warm bed of love.

We had been married only two years
and your parents had made
some initial old-fashioned fuss,
but you, my dear, had insisted politely,
with the hidden steel of a German officer
(I think they were a little afraid of you)
and I loved you all the more for that.
You made me so happy.

Your father had an eye for a pretty girl
(yes, you smiled when you told me!)
and your mother soon capitulated
when she saw how much I loved you.
O Christian, Christian,
in those early days, we were
so happy together, so proud!

The degenerate filthy French
had been soundly trounced,
and the treacherous arrogant English
were left snarling on their island,
and the new Germany, under Adolf Hitler
was rightly triumphant!

The shame and the stain
of the First War had been erased
(in which my father fell, as you know)
and the German nation, reborn,
was holding a lamp to the world:
Kraft durch Freude, Strength through Joy,
a bulwark against godless communism,
a shining example of truth.

Do you remember, my darling,
the day we first met?
You were a young lieutenant
and I was with the BDM
(I was a leader, you never knew that)
and we were lost in the crowds
the celebrating thousands
cheering for Goering and Der Fuehrer
after the fall of France:
such a day of national pride!

I was pushed this way and that,
lost one of my shoes, such enthusiasm,
and you, my dark-eyed knight
came to my rescue, plucked me forth
from the surging multitudes,
and carried me off for coffee and cakes
at the Adlon Hotel. Such class!
I fell in love immediately.

The courtship was exciting,
but correct and approved,
and we were married within six months
after the usual blood tests
and racial examinations;
I thought my heart would burst
with sheer joy. O my darling!

The War continued for some reason
although everyone knew
we had already won. The British
behaved very badly, in my opinion,
but you fought like a lion, naturally,
gaining a Knight's Cross (First Class!!)
and well-deserved promotion.
Then came your first command.




When you were at sea
I used to pray for you.
In one corner of my little room
(we had to move to your parents
when the cowardly bombing began)
I had a picture of the Sacred Heart,
and in another, the divine Fuehrer,
and with my arms outstretched,
I prayed to both of our saviours.

Keep my Christian safe!

Such joy when you returned,
I would rush headlong to the docks
(along with your mother and father,
now my dear friends, lovingly united
in our adoration for YOU, dear Christian)
and you would hold me in your strong arms,
there in full view of your crew,
lustily cheering and smiling,
waving their caps, whistling:
O how they loved you!

But never as much as me.

In June came the attack on Russia.
We were surprised, but realised
these swine were the real enemy,
the Bolshevik dagger at the throat
of western civilisation: the foul
English, blind to decency and reason,
continued their useless resistance,
and you, my dear, punished them
remorselessly. Your name was respected.
I was proud to be your wife.

I noticed how haggard
you had become; with each
successive homecoming from a patrol
you became more withdrawn, less
enthusiastic for the dream of Greater Germany.
Naturally, I restored your patriotism,
even when you were snappish and surly,
but I was a bit taken aback, darling,
when you removed the portrait of the Fuehrer,
and once (almost) I had the feeling
you were about to strike me:
silly, silly -- my imagination.

America (I mean, really!)
came into the war, and the bombing
became much much worse.
They are such hateful, despicable
opportunists, everybody knows that,
bought off by the British and the Jews;
they are in this war for money, nothing else.
Can't they understand anything?
The Bolshevik hordes want to destroy Europe.
Only Germany can prevent disaster.

Strange news is coming from the East
which I can't believe: the BBC
is spreading vile propaganda
about German actions in Russia.
These people will say anything.
They also say that the Jews,
having been removed for their own safety,
are being eliminated. Nonsense.
Our enemies will go to any length.

I worry about darling Christian .....
--------------------------------------------------
At this point Frau Proschkow broke down and was unable to continue. The news of her husband's death shortly after the birth of their first child is something she still cannot discuss. There is evidence that Frau Proschkow entered into a liaison with an American sergeant after the conclusion of hostilities and was thus provided with food and also cigarettes and nylons which she was able to trade on the black market. Charitably, one must assume that this was done to protect her young son Johann although this relationship seems to have led to an unhealable breach with her late husband's parents. In 1955 she married a prosperous factory owner named Werner Proschkow with whom she appears to have lived amicably until the death of Herr Proschkow in 1970. Johann Meier-Proschkow is now a senior executive with Siemens in Munich. Frau Proschkow lives alone in an apartment in Berlin surrounded by photographs and memoribilia of the early 1940s, most prominent of which are citations from the BDM and two large studio photographs of her first husband in naval uniform. He looks remarkably young.
-------------------------
Notes: Title * Under the waves stays with you my heart (My heart lies with you under the ocean waves)
BDM- Bund Deutscher Maedel - female equivalent of the Hitler Youth.

Airey Takes the Plunge

(a restoration drama in several acts)

Airey was a friend in truth,
a fairy, yes, but not a poof;
a tough guy called Reg
threw him off a high ledge.
It's a long way to tip poor Airey.



When I have fears that I may cease to be
far away from friends and family,
I think, by God, although I'm odd,
I welcome change, however strange:
in a cheerful melancholy way,
Death could be a holiday.

In fires forever burning,
on a spit forever turning,
just like a Turkish kebab;
I'm glad I never paid the tab
in so many clubs and bars.
God, won’t they be raging!
the thought is quite engaging:
they’ll be tearing their hair
as if I care
for all them drinks I bought!

I never thought,
I never thought I’d wake up
after I hit the ground
at ten zillion miles an hour.
Splat! That’s that.
Wishy-washy lack of belief
affords but scant and thin relief
for the falling, failing agnostic.
Here is a falsely true acrostic:
Sweet dreams by icy lethal waters.*

The myriad sons and daughters
of O’Leary of the Yellow Hand
have formed a band,
here in the place I’m at.
I told that them I couldn’t sing,
but they want to know what I can bring
to add to the balance of joy.
Where’s God? So sorry, m'boy,
He’s away, he’s always away.
And the Divil’s off in Osaka Japan
to follow up on his business plan,
(An Dhool is no fool)
trawling for souls in a language school.

Listen, will I be dead for a long time?
Just as long as ye like.
On yer bike, resurrect some hobby
and make it last ten thousand years.
Any wee jobby to keep yer mind off things,
but stay away from collecting stamps:
stamp tramps are pure ferocious:
Super Calley Went Ballistic: Celtic Were Atrocious.
Hierophants and sycophants
make me want to wet me pants,
revert to my psychosis.

But can I do that, like?
Wet meself, scratch, play with girls?
No, you can’t. You’re, like, disembodied.
What about this pain in me arse?
Imaginary, old son.
You can keep the pain
but yer arse is dead and gone.
Where’s it gone to, so?
The Soap Factory.

In cold brittle little exchanges
I accommodate myself to certain changes.
Aren’t ye glad ye’re Catlick?
Y’wha?? Fuck you on about?
Even so. You should see the shabby sheds
where they stick the poor sad feckin Neds.
The Jews have chic flats in the Mews
(they were right all along)
Oooh, baby, won’t you shake your thong?
Instruct us, don't you dare amuse!
And them towel heads? Don’t arsk.
I don’t ask. And the Jehovahs?
They’re stuck with the oul’ whores
knocking on doors, forever and ever
and ever and ever. Amen.

Well, I never! This cheers me up
considerably. Jayz, I could
kill for a pint. Are there any pubs in Hell?
Naturallement! As Monsieur knows well
the Squareheads, the Jocks and the Micks
couldn’t die without them. There are Czechs
and balances, mind you, like the Skandies
who have acquired a taste for shaving lotion,
an effective if quite "deadly" potion.
Har, har, a pun. What fun! Listen,
we send people back from time to time,
would you like to go? I don’t know.
Being dead's, like, doin’ in me head,
but it’s not so bad, y’know?
Even so. Pack up and go:
back to the World of the Living.
Cease receiving, son. Start giving.

Right, then, here’s me,
rejected back to Life:
-- Suit, white shirt, necktie: check!
-- Red underpants, socks with clocks: check!
-- Sunglasses, watch, gold chains: check!
-- Cellphone, iPod, 3 rubber johnnies.
Hello there, Life, Allo, Allo!
Jeez, it’s fuckin raining.
I’m out of training.
I’ve forgotten how to talk
I can hardly bleedin walk
sedately; innately, I feel
that none of this is real.

O Jayzus, damn, by heck!
I just got a bang on the back of the neck.
I turn to my oppressor,
a large and hairy male cross-dresser
in a pink tutu and fawn little boots.
Beige, ye barstid, fawn is outré!
but what I really want to say
is 'oo the feck are yoo?
I delivered a thump and a bit of a bump
'coz ye look just like a ghost
mon semblable, mon frere,
are ye back from under there?"

I yam. Right, so, whattya think,
will we call it quits and go for a drink?
Seventeen pints after,
ciggies, girls, and gurgling laughter,
it's home with young Ivy Malone
on the Bakerloo, she don’t live alone.
The thing to do, she tells me,
is climb up the garden ladder
Because I reelly don’t want me fadder
or mudder to see yez. Haul away.
Show a light in the windy, sweet darlint,
show a light where I can see yez,
yer luverly pearl-white arms,
yer full abundant charms!
And here’s a tiny little kiss,
a promise of a night of bliss.

I feel so drained
yet self-contained
as I gaze into the glass:
a faint recognition
of the apparition
I know to be myself.
Dead, mislaid, or on the shelf,
this, too, I think, shall pass.
Her flashing eyes!
Her thunderous thighs!
All in two words explained:
convent trained.
Her legs grab tight-ily,
mightily wrap around my ass:
heave-ho, puff and blow!
Sky is high and ocean deep:
will she never go to sleep?

Ah, it’s not bad to be alive
once more. I can’t remember when
before it felt this cool. A general rule
is to keep the head down low,
and let the winds crack and blow
above you, like young sweet Ivy Malone
breathing hard in her shoebox of a room
up there on Dollis Hill.
I close my eyes, I remember still
her posters of Duran Duran,
the night I was her only man.

Being dead ain’t that bad, either,
once you get the hang of it, like.
The thing is being killed,
being shot or stabbed or smashed to bits
or tossed off a high building;
that’s the bit I don’t much care for.
Reg had hairs sprouting from his nose
and he had a bit of a ripe smell about him,
so when he pushed me off the roof that day
I had a bit of a snob thing about him,
not at all in my league, I’d have to say.

Time to drop in on hairy Reg.
I can imagine his moonlike pasty face
as he takes my presence in.
I’ll slip in the icy uncanny wedge
of fear. Here is a ghost, my dear!
But things seldom work out
quite as one expects: in many respects
Death and Life are both unfair.
I stand before this old armchair
and gaze on Reg, unprepossessing sight,
He’s been out all night,
God, he looks the worse for wear;
wheezing, snorting through his nose,
crumpled-up clothes, drunk as a coot,
one filthy, ugly, smelly brute.

When he wakes up, I’ll top him,
but not until he knows,
not until he really knows.
Then I’ll walk into the hall,
and descend. I need a friend,
have none at all. I was in love
and then I wasn't in love.
I was also once in life,
and then no longer in that.
Snow falls on distant mountains.
Sweet dreams by icy lethal waters.
Drip … drip … drip.

-----------------------------------------------------
* a falsely true acrostic, in that only 22 of the 28 letters are used with an extra 'e' thrown in; seven words.

The Irish Cycle: Lord Malahide

Fourteen years. Two children.
One miscarriage; her racking sobs in the night.
Her eyes reveal nothing; I hardly know her.

Her eyes are hazel with flecks of green,
She has noble carriage, a proud woman’s gait;
Her black sweeping hair has a blueish sheen,
She stands before me, my wife and mate.

- Dear wife.
- My lord husband.

Why have I ignored her all these years,
Under the one roof, food from the one table;
My voice when I speak holds back the tears:
Can I bridge this chasm, am I still able?

- The children?
- Quite safe, My Lord. They sleep.
- I have need to speak with you.
- My Lord?
- Come, let us move into a private chamber.
- Shall I disrobe?
- No, no, no, no, no – it’s not like that at all!
- Have I displeased you in some way?
- Not at all, my dear, quite the contrary.

O’REILLY !!!

- Sir, yes sir?
- Bring us some wine, like a good fellow.
- Very good, sir. The usual, is it?
- No, no … bring in the good Spanish.
- Not much left, sir. Are ye sure?
- Just do what I tell you, dammit!
- Rightyo, sir.
- And don’t say rightyo!
- Righty …very good, sir.

We move into the wind-cooled room,
It has Italian marble walls and floor;
There is a passing chill, a hint of the tomb,
I softly, firmly, shut the door.

- My Lord?
- My dear, I cherish and respect you.
- My Lord is most gracious.
- O, stop that! The fact is I love you.
- Love, my Lord?
- Perhaps I haven’t made my feelings plain.
- Lady Agnes, Lady Jane,
Lady Patricia, the parlour maid,
and that little blonde wench in the kitchen?
My Lord has made his feelings plain enough.
- O, come now, that means nothing!
- My Lord, I think it does.

Knock-knock

- What now?
- The wine, sir.
- Bring it in, blast you!
- Rightyo, sir.
- And don’t you bloody well …
- Ah, sorry, sir.
The good Spanish, sir.
Not much left of it, mind,
I was just after telling the cook …
-Would you kindly pour the wine, O’Reilly?
Pour the wine, man, and clear off!
- There was fourteen sat down to breakfast
and every one, sir, was dead before dinner.
- What? Not now, O’Reilly.
- Tis a vision, sir. I saw it clearly.
These things will come to pass.
- I’ll wring your bloody neck, O’Reilly.
How’s that for a vision?
- Rightyo, sir.

A pause. A tasteless sip of priceless wine.

- My dear, the situation …
- I am aware of the situation.
The enemy has marched from Dublin.
We will soon be under attack.
- Yes, well, I suppose the whole castle knows.
- And now my Lord is … afraid?

When she spoke those words, love drained from my heart,
I gazed at her coldly from across four hundred years;
Like my forefathers I too could play my part,
I would never, could never, succumb to my fears.

- You misunderstand me, my Lady.
- I think I understand you well enough.
- I see. You will stay with the children.
Neither they nor you will come to any harm.

There was a glint in her eyes, a hint of derision,
a mockery in those hazel, green-flecked eyes,
and I could suddenly catch a glimpse of myself
as seen by this woman through all those years.
Upon this, not the battle, I reflected, ruefully,
as I strapped on my nearly new armour
and called for my old but sharpened sword.

Soon came the enemy to the gates:
dear God, these brazen, upstart English!
Well, it was the usual confused affair,
a lot of noise and dust and private agony.
We were deemed to have won since we didn’t quite lose,
the traditional form of Irish victory,
and our lives settled back to the normal round.

I continue to live at the castle,
Richard, Lord Admiral of Malahide
and the adjoining seas surrounding,
with my lady wife and children.
She looks at me now with apprehension.
O’Reilly has a brother, a prosperous smuggler;
we have twenty new barrels of good Spanish wine.
Upon occasion, as a means of diversion,
I ride to Dublin with a light escort,
there to visit certain friends of mine.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Malahide Castle was built by the Talbots in 1185 and remained in the family until the death of the last in the male line, Sir Milo, in 1973. On the morning of July 1, 1689 (by the Old Calendar) fourteen men of the family sat down together for breakfast and by nightfall all fourteen had fallen at the Battle of the Boyne. The castle and surrounding parklands were sold to the Irish State in 1975 and are a popular picnic destination for Dubliners. The pleasant seaside village bearing the same name is now home to Adam Clayton and the Edge of the rock band U2.

Japan

Japan
is a neon tangle
of buildings and streets
and black-haired people
scuttling among
indecipherable signs
flashing flashing
with vending machines
on every city block
dispensing
condoms and coca-cola and coffee
beer and cigarettes
farm-fresh eggs
whatever you want but don't really need
in a never-ending
mechanical amoral hedonistic
cornocupia



















Japan
when you step off the plane
for the first time
overwhelms your senses
and makes you
think seriously
you are on some other planet
nobody understands a word you say
but when you
leave the "gaijin" cocoon
tentatively, slowly
full of misgivings
as when you first do something unusual
you can't help smiling

Japan
sucks you in
even Tokyo
a frenetic urban nightmare
with a whiff of drains
entrances
your roving imagination
enhances
your sliding divorce
from familiarity
this country
this whole damn archipelago
is
Disneyland on wheels
and when
you get food drink and shelter
(a job)
you start to think
hoo boy!



















Japan
revolves around you
spinning
because
you are a drop-in from Mars
you can't understand
you can't speak
you can't read
and you sure as hell can't write
so
you wander about like
an amiable impressionable
idiot
and this is when
the first great decision comes
you either
seek out other exiles
to complain to commiserate
to criticise
or else you
jump into the strangeness.















Japan
is surprisingly
tolerant
of opinionated loudmouths
from overseas, but
when you crawl out
from under that shell
you start to discover
a different country
in which delicacy
of feeling
sensitivity
and a strong reverence for ancient traditions
still exists
in a quiet restrained
understated way
as if the people
were shy to share
age-old convictions
with yawping barbarians.

Japan
is umbillically attuned
to each passing season
festivals and family gatherings
are faithfully observed
from generation to generation
but done so casually
so confidently
you sense
with a surge of sudden knowledge
that you are walking
in the presence of the past
and the long-dead generations
look down benignly
and with fond affection
on the children of the present
you can feel that
and after a while
want to be part of it

Japan
is almost wilfully
misunderstood
we think of them
as a nation of worker robots
in a way that repairs our pride
and appeases the pain
of Pearl Harbour
Bataan, the Bangkok Railway
and puts them down
belittling the fangs
of a former enemy
(a formidable people
when aroused)
who scared
the living bejesus
out of our grandfathers
but you wouldn't know it
now, with everything
so clean so polite
so efficient
you can drop your wallet on the street
and pick it up next week.















Japan
begins to open
its inner doors
after fearful painful struggle
when you start to crack
the hard nutty core of language
in the first three years
sweating blood
you think you are doing well
in the next three years
you come to realize
you know nothing
so when I saw
that fashionable movie
Lost in Translation
I thought: what these people
are doing is celebrating
their own incomprehension
their alienation
in the hope
of getting back
to the Real World soon

Japan
is
equally real