Having left hard ground behind
in the hardness of their place-names,
they have sailed out for an island:

as along the top of a wood
their boats have crossed the green ridges,
so has the pale sky overhead

appeared as a milky surface,
a white plain where the speckled fish
drift in lainb-white clouds of fleece.

As their sails will be covering
for the first houses that they build,
so their boats will be hovering

in the smoke of their first fires,
like red blood falling will be
their landing on the first shores.

They will come back to the warm earth
and call it by possessive names:
mother, thorned rose, woman, love’s birth;

to hard hills of stone they will give
the words for breast; to meadowland,
the soft gutturals of rivers,

tongues of water; to firm plains, flesh,
as one day we will discover
their way of living, in their death.

They entered their soft beds of soil
not as graves, for this was the land
that they had fought for, loved, and killed

each other for. They’d arrive again:
death could be no horizon
but the shoreline of their island,

a coming and going as flood
comes after ebb. In the spirals
of their brooches is seen the flight

of one thing into the other:
as the wheel-ruts on a battle —
plain have filled with silver water,

the confused circles of their wars,
their cattle-raids, have worked themselves
to a laced pattern of old scars.

In their speckled parchments we read
of word-play in the halls of kings,
of how these people loved to fight,

yet where are their fine houses now?
They are hammered into the ground,
they have been laid bare by the plough.

Yet their death, since it is no real
death, will happen over again
and again, their bones will seem still

to fall in the hail beneath hooves
of horses, their limbs will drift down
as the branches that trees have loosed.

We cannot yet say why or how
they could not take things as they were.
Some day we will learn of how

their bronze swords took the shape of leaves;
their gold spears are found in cornfields,
their arrows are found in trees.

The duck patrol is waddling down the odd-number side of Raglan
            Street,
The bass-ackwards private at the rear trying not to think of a third
            eye
Being drilled in the back of his head. Fifty-five. They stop. The
            head
Peers round, then leaps the gap of Balaclava Street. He waves the
            body over
One by one. Forty-nine. Cape Street. A gable wall. Garnet Street.
            A gable wall.
Frere Street. Forty-seven. Forty-five-and-a-half. Milan Street. A
            grocer’s shop.
They stop. They check their guns. Thirteen. Milton Street. An iron
            lamp-post.
Number one. Ormond Street. Two ducks in front of a duck and two
            ducks
Behind a duck, how many ducks? Five? No. Three. This is not the end.

If there was a house with three girls in it,
It only took three boys to make a dance.
You’d see a glimmer where McKeown’s once was
And follow it till it became a house.
But maybe they’d have gone on, up the hill
To Loughran’s, or made across the grazing,
Somewhere else. All those twistings and turnings,
Crossroads and dirt roads and skittery lanes:
You’d be glad to get in from the dark.
And when you did get in, there’d be a power
Of poteen. A big tin creamery churn,
A ladle, those mugs with blue and white bars.
Oh, good and clear like the best of water.
The music would start up. This one ould boy
would sit by the fire and rosin away,
Sawing and sawing till it fell like snow.
That poteen was quare stuff. At the end of
The night you might be fiddling with no bow.
When everyone was ready, out would come
The tin of Tate and Lyle’s Golden Syrup,
A spoon or a knife, a big farl of bread.
Some of those same boys wouldn’t bother with
The way you were supposed to screw it up.
There might be courting going on outside,
Whisperings and cacklings in the barnyard;
A spider thread of gold-thin syrup
Trailed out across the glowing kitchen tiles
Into the night of promises, or broken promises.

Your man, says the Man, will walk into the bar like this - here his fingers
Mimic a pair of legs, one stiff at the knee - you’ll know exactly
What to do. He sticks a finger to his head. Pretend it’s child’s play -
The hand might be a horse’s mouth, a rabbit or a dog. Five handclaps.
Walls have ears: the shadows you throw are the shadows you try to throw off.
I snuffed out the candle between finger and thumb. Was it the left
            hand
Hacked off at the wrist and thrown to the shores of Ulster? Did Ulster
Exist? Or the Right Hand of God, saying Stop to this and No to that?
My thumb is the hammer of a gun. The thump goes up. The thump
            goes down.

Horse Boyle was called Horse Boyle because of his brother Mule;
Though why Mule was called Mule is anybody’s guess. I stayed there once,
Or rather, I nearly stayed there once. But that’s another story.
At any rate they lived in this decrepit caravan, not two miles out of Carrick,
Encroached upon by baroque pyramids of empty baked bean tins, rusts
And ochres, hints of autumn merging into twilight. Horse believed
They were as good as a watchdog, and to tell you the truth
You couldn’t go near the place without something falling over:
A minor avalanche would ensue - more like a shop bell, really,

The old-fashioned ones on a string, connected to the latch, I think,
And as you entered in, the bell would tinkle in the empty shop, a musk
Of soap and turf and sweets would hit you from the gloom. Tobacco.
Baling wire. Twine. And, of course, shelves and pyramids of tins.
An old woman would appear from the back - there was a sizzling pan in there,
Somewhere, a whiff of eggs and bacon - and ask you what you wanted;
Or rather, she wouldn’t ask; she would talk about the weather. It had rained
That day, but it was looking better. They had just put in the spuds.
I had only come to pass the time of day, so I bought a token packet of Gold Leaf.

All this time the fry was frying away. Maybe she’d a daughter in there
Somewhere, though I hadn’t heard the neighbours talk of it; if anybody knew,
It would be Horse. Horse kept his ears to the ground.
And he was a great man for current affairs; he owned the only TV in the place.
Come dusk he’d set off on his rounds, to tell the whole townland the latest
Situation in the Middle East, a mortar bomb attack in Mullaghbawn -
The damn things never worked, of course - and so he’d tell the story
How in his young day it was very different. Take young Flynn, for instance,
Who was ordered to take this bus and smuggle some sticks of gelignite

Across the border, into Derry, when the RUC - or was it the RIC? -
Got wind of it. The bus was stopped, the peeler stepped on. Young Flynn
Took it like a man, of course: he owned up right away. He opened the bag
And produced the bomb, his rank and serial number. For all the world
Like a pound of sausages. Of course, the thing was, the peeler’s bike
Had got a puncture, and he didn’t know young Flynn from Adam. All he wanted
Was to get home for his tea. Flynn was in for seven years and learned to speak
The best of Irish. He had thirteen words for a cow in heat;
A word for the third thwart in a boat, the wake of a boat on the ebb tide.

He knew the extinct names of insects, flowers, why this place was called
Whatever: Carrick, for example, was a rock. He was damn right there -
As the man said, When you buy meat you buy bones, when you buy land you buy stones.
You’d be hard put to find a square foot in the whole bloody parish
That wasn’t thick with flints and pebbles. To this day he could hear the grate
And scrape as the spade struck home, for it reminded him of broken bones:
Digging a graveyard, maybe - or, better still, trying to dig a reclaimed tip
Of broken delph and crockery ware - you know that sound that sets your teeth on edge
When the chalk squeaks on the blackboard, or you shovel ashes from the stove?

Master McGinty - he’d be on about McGinty then, and discipline, the capitals
Of South America, Moore’s Melodies, the Battle of Clontarf, and
Tell me this, an educated man like you: What goes on four legs when it’s young,
Two legs when it’s grown up, and three legs when it’s old? I’d pretend
I didn’t know. McGinty’s leather strap would come up then, stuffed
With threepenny bits to give it weight and sting. Of course, it never did him
Any harm: You could take a horse to water but you couldn’t make him drink.
He himself was nearly going on to be a priest.
And many’s the young cub left the school, as wise as when he came.

Carrowkeel was where McGinty came from - Narrow Quarter, Flynn explained -
Back before the Troubles, a place that was so mean and crabbed,
Horse would have it, men were known to eat their dinner from a drawer.
Which they’d slide shut the minute you’d walk in.
He’d demonstrate this at the kitchen table, hunched and furtive, squinting
Out the window - past the teetering minarets of rust, down the hedge-dark aisle -
To where a stranger might appear, a passer-by, or what was maybe worse,
Someone he knew. Someone who wanted something. Someone who was hungry.
Of course who should come tottering up the lane that instant but his brother

Mule. I forgot to mention they were twins. They were as like as two -
No, not peas in a pod, for this is not the time nor the place to go into
Comparisons, and this is really Horse’s story, Horse who - now I’m getting
Round to it - flew over Dresden in the war. He’d emigrated first, to
Manchester. Something to do with scrap - redundant mill machinery,
Giant flywheels, broken looms that would, eventually, be ships, or aeroplanes.
He said he wore his fingers to the bone.
And so, on impulse, he had joined the RAF. He became a rear gunner.
Of all the missions, Dresden broke his heart. It reminded him of china.

As he remembered it, long afterwards, he could hear, or almost hear
Between the rapid desultory thunderclaps, a thousand tinkling echoes -
All across the map of Dresden, store-rooms full of china shivered, teetered
And collapsed, an avalanche of porcelain, slushing and cascading: cherubs,
Shepherdesses, figurines of Hope and Peace and Victory, delicate bone fragments.
He recalled in particular a figure from his childhood, a milkmaid
Standing on the mantelpiece. Each night as they knelt down for the rosary,
His eyes wold wander up to where she seemed to beckon to him, smiling,
Offering him, eternally, her pitcher of milk, her mouth of rose and cream.

One day, reaching up to hold her yet again, his fingers stumbled, and she fell.
He lifted down a biscuit tin, and opened it.
It breathed an antique incense: things like pencils, snuff, tobacco.
His war medals. A broken rosary. And there, the milkmaid’s creamy hand, the outstretched
Pitcher of milk, all that survived. Outside, there was a scraping
And a tittering; I knew Mule’s step by now, his careful drunken weaving
Through the tin-stacks. I might have stayed the night, but there’s no time
To go back to that now; I could hardly, at any rate, pick up the thread.
I wandered out through the steeples of rust, the gate that was a broken bed.