Enlightenment

We were in thrall of great things:
men sitting around television sets
talking of war, made history obsolete
at the kitchen table.

I was baptised in fire,
schoolbooks charring to ash
like clothes, hair, bone,

burnt-out skeletons of cars,
the blackened windows of buildings,

and the priest shouting behind the barricade,
Go on boys, give them one for Ireland,
as my father took his army revolver
down from the box on top of the wardrobe.

What could they teach us?
summer days we shared cigarettes
watching the ferry leaving the docks
for Liverpool

though none of us had the courage later
to act on conviction.

We sought out sanctuary
where violent death could not find us:
I found solace among the heavy breathing
the sweat and smell of animal flesh

and spied on the stable boys
blowing each other.

Even so, we had our premonitions:
a row of old houses sat at the end
of an avenue of chestnuts

on its gable wall a clock
the hands set at the wrong time -
to fool the devil.

All my childhood skies were high blue cold
seen from a small walled Belfast yard,
the iron bones of Samson and Goliath,

a stick in an overflowing drain,

my father working between two faiths‹
skin as fragile as Palestine peaches.

The eye was stone‹
she had lived her life behind barricades

of household furniture and labour rights:

a loose spindle, they docked her a shilling,
still nimble fingers played in a dish

of seashells

brought by a fifteen year old girl
from a Scottish strand to a marriage bed.

And the white faces, ringed eyes
of the young mill workers

under rows of morning to evening lights,
were so conditioned

they menstruated on the same days.

A voice called out across the wastelands
from Cave Hill to Narrow Water Castle‹

here is the wages of bread and agitation:

and the clang of iron on iron from the shipyard
made me freeze like the droplets on my hands

as I thought of my father,
strung out like the broken thread of a loom.

Gary Allen is from Northern Ireland. He has published two poetry collections with Black Mountain Press, Languages and Exiles, and a collection of stories with Lagan Press.