That August afternoon the family Gathered.
There was a native déjà vu
Of Funeral when we settled against the couch
On our sunburnt knees.
We gripped mugs of tea
Tightly and soaked the TV spectacle;
The boxed ritual in our living-room.

My father recited prayers of memory,
Of monster meetings, blazing tar-barrels
Planted outside Free-State homes, the Broy-
Harriers pushing through a crowd, Blueshirts;
Making Churchill’s imperial palette blur.

What I remember is one decade of darkness,
A mind-stifling boredom; long summers
For blackberry picking and churning cream,
Winters for saving timber or setting lines
And snares: none of the joys of here and now
With its instant jam, instant heat and cream:

It was a landscape for old men. Today
They lowered the tallest one, tidied him
Away while his people watched quietly.
In the end he had retreated to the first dream,
Caning truth. I think of his austere grandeur;
Taut sadness, like old heroes he had imagined.

For my first poem there are specific images
herded like schoolchildren into a neat row.
There is an ear and human finger hanging
from the linden tree in the Park north of
Maria Square and, between there and Morskaya
Street, other images of defeat. Such
as a black article in a Fascist newspaper
blowing along the footpath, or an old soldier
throwing insults at lovers out walking.
Even the schveitsar in our hallway
sharpens pencils for my father’s meeting
as if sharpening the guillotine of the future.
There is only Tamara, who arrives with the poem
as something good; her wayward hair tied back
with a bow of black silk. Her neck,
in the long light of summer, is covered
with soft down like the bloom on almonds.
When winter comes I’ll miss school to listen
to her minor, uvular poems, her jokes,
her snorting laughter in St Petersburg museums.
I have all this; this luxury of love; until
she says: ‘a flaw has appeared in us,
it’s the strain of winters in St Petersburg’ -
and like a heroine from a second-rate
matinée in Nevski Street she steps into the womb
of the Metro to become a part of me forever.
So many things must happen at once in this,
this single chrysalis of memory, this poem.
While my son weeps by my side at a border
checkpoint, a caterpillar ascends
the stalk of a campanula, a butterfly comes to rest
on the leaf of a tree with an unforgettable
name; an old man sighs in an orchard
in the Crimea, an even older housekeeper
loses her mind and the keys to our kitchen.
A young servant is sharpening the blade
of the future, while my father leaps
into the path of an assassin’s bullet
at a brief August lecture in Berlin.
All these things must happen at once
before the rainstorm clears, leaving one
drop of water pinned down by its own weight.
When it falls from the linden leaf I shall
run to my mother, forever waiting forever
waiting, with maternal Russian tears,
to listen to her son’s one and only poem.

The late March mist is an angry Cerberus,
sniffing debris, sniffing the helpless
with its moist noses. The dead are bunched together:
a woman decapitated by a flying wheel-rim,
her daughter screaming 'Help me! Help Mama!’
I crawl through a shattered windscreen
to taste diesel fumes, pungent scattered grain
from the overturned distillery truck.
Arc-lights go on everywhere although
it’s still daylight. My eyes hurt. My arms.
My neck is wet, a bloody mist thickening,
a soft March day. There’s blood and rain
on the tarmac. Bodies lie stone-quiet
after the catapult of speed.
Even the injured snore deeply. Some will never
come back, never grow warm again.
My mind fills with the constant mutilated dead,
the Ulster dead, the perennial traffic-accident
of Ireland. Here are funerals being made.
A priest walks among the wounded,
Christian stretcher-bearer, helper
and scavenger. My mind fills with hatred.
I race before him to the comatose,
shouting ‘You’ll be fine! just keep warm!’
and cover a mother with my duffle-coat.
It is my will against his,
I want to shroud the woman’s soul with love,
hesitant, imperfect, but this side of Paradise.
Everywhere is the sound of wailing pain.
A surgeon hurries past, sweating,
his tattered gown is purple with blood,
his face a dark blue narcissus.
I have only words to offer, nothing
like pethidine or the oils of Extreme Unction.
Beside me the woman dies, peppered with barley -
plucked from the insane world like Persephone.