[...]

Saturday

Wellington, Blenheim, Spitfire, Hurricane:
the name for each familiar silhouette
labouring like a model aeroplane
up there in thin formation, was pre-set

in what I learned, like most boys of my age,
from war-comics, from films on TV,
when fighting men would slash the screen and page
with blinding fire, or screams of agony

(exotic cries from Germans or Japanese
at the extremities of pain and fear
were more grist to the mill—we took up these
in playgrounds where the War went on all year,

when stockpiled arms were both elaborate
and fiercely imagined, every shell
had its right calibre, all accurate
as little pedants moved in for the kill.)

Knowing their names, I pored over the sky
and, as the planes kept up their stately pace,
I stood in close to you, watching them fly
over us and away, until no trace

was left in clouds or the resounding air
of shapes familiar fifty years ago,
engines once listened out for everywhere,
a drum and buzz distinct from the known, low [60]

thrumming of German bombers on the nights
when London took a pasting and took fire,
cascades of bombs setting its heart alight
to leave it by daytime a smouldering pyre

with figures like stick-figures in attendance
—fire hoses and tin helmets, stretcher-men
to bear away the dead with routine patience,
black tons of rubble, miles of rot and ruin—

and life resuming stubbornly all around
with boredom and endurance hedging bets
on who would win the day, and the days drowned
in weak beer, wrapped in smoke from cigarettes.

When I was born, the whole show had been over
for seventeen years; a new and stilted war
was being played behind-hand, under cover,
with history’s chessmen ready everywhere:

Castro and Kennedy, the Bay of Pigs;
Berlin smashed and possessed and cut in two:
prowled over by B-52S and MIGs,
Europe was scarcely likely to pull through,

so the last War went into storybooks,
and boys pretending to be soldiers crept
up on each other, while jumpily in nooks
and crannies all the stealthy missiles slept

their way through a strange peacetime, and through whole
decades of stand-off, bluff, and false alarm,
as I slogged out the long campaign through school
and won at last, having come to no real harm.

[...; 61]

Sunday

[...]

Wrapped up in peace, I was nearly twelve years old,
waiting for school to finish for the day:
rain in the light, the weather turning cold,
traffic outside with traffic in its way

not moving, locked on the Stranmillis Road,
on the Malone and Lisburn Roads, stacked down
to Shaftesbury Square, or where some episode
or other must have closed the heart of town,

and taking it for granted, thinking past
diversions and stopped buses, through road-blocks
and windows strapped with tape against the blast
of bombs not yet exploded, or the shocks

that glass was heir to; I would sit and wait
for twenty to four, the bell, and day-release,
the slow trek across town to be home late,
through desolation with the name of peace, [64]

a burst map of the past, claims and admissions,
abstracted history cracked up, falling in
with the blown brick and concrete, dull attritions
of a war I didn’t start and couldn’t win.

The burn of sunset now, two decades on,
lit miles of sky in coral and louder red:
I was safe; the past was over; the sun shone
pitilessly on me and on all the dead,

for this was pastoral; I could almost see
the dead together in a wall of light,
closing their hearts, climbing away from me,
into a ghost-glare early in the night,

in march-past, in a simple, strict parade,
until the fireworks split up in the dark,
each flash and blur, each crack and sudden fade
of colour an after-image, a faint mark

coming and going in the uncurtained room
where we both sat it out, up in the air,
in the rush and rustle, click and smack and boom
of lights as they sprayed and scattered everywhere.