Read Poems 1960-2000 for Free Online Page B

trees
    in the municipal gardens. And beside it,
    this. I circled around them,
    backing away over wet grass and beechmast,
    aiming the camera (since I had it with me,
    since I was playing tourist this afternoon)
    and saw two little boys pelting across.
    ‘Take our photo! Take our photo! Please!’
    We talked it over for a bit –
    how I couldn’t produce one then and there;
    but could I send it to them with the postman?
    Well, could they give me their addresses?
    Kevin Tierney and Declan McCallion,
    Tobergill Gardens. I wrote, they stood and smiled,
    I clicked, and waved goodbye, and went.
    Two miles away, an hour later,
    heading dutifully through the damp golf-course
    to Lough Neagh, I thought about the rock,
    wanting it. Not for my own salvation;
    hardly at all for me: for sick Belfast,
    for the gunmen and the slogan-writers,
    for the poor crazy girl I met in the station,
    for Kevin and Declan, who would soon mistrust
    all camera-carrying strangers. But of course
    the thing’s already theirs: a monument,
    a functionless, archaic, pitted stone
    and a few mouthfuls of black rainwater.

Please Identify Yourself
    British, more or less; Anglican, of a kind.
    In Cookstown I dodge the less urgent question
    when a friendly Ulsterbus driver raises it;
    ‘You’re not a Moneymore girl yourself ?’ he asks,
    deadpan. I make a cowardly retrogression,
    slip ten years back. ‘No, I’m from New Zealand.’
    ‘Are you now? Well, that’s a coincidence:
    the priest at Moneymore’s a New Zealander.’
    And there’s the second question, unspoken.
    Unanswered.
                          I go to Moneymore
    anonymously, and stare at all three churches.
    In Belfast, though, where sides have to be taken,
    I stop compromising – not that you’d guess,
    seeing me hatless there among the hatted,
    neutral voyeur among the shining faces
    in the glossy Martyrs’ Memorial Free Church.
    The man himself is cheerleader in the pulpit
    for crusader choruses: we’re laved in blood,
    marshalled in ranks. I chant the nursery tunes
    and mentally cross myself. You can’t stir me
    with evangelistic hymns, Dr Paisley:
    I know them. Nor with your computer-planned
    sermon – Babylon, Revelation, whispers
    of popery, slams at the IRA, more blood.
    I scrawl incredulous notes under my hymnbook
    and burn with Catholicism.
                                                  Later
    hacking along the Lower Falls Road
    against a gale, in my clerical black coat,
    I meet a bright gust of tinselly children
    in beads and lipstick and their mothers’ dresses
    for Hallowe’en; who chatter and surround me.
    Over-reacting once again (a custom
    of the country, not mine alone) I give them
    all my loose change for their rattling tin
    and my blessing – little enough. But now
    to my tough Presbyterian ancestors,
    Brooks and Hamilton, lying in the graves
    I couldn’t find at Moneymore and Cookstown
    among so many unlabelled bones, I say:
    I embrace you also, my dears.

Richey
    My great-grandfather Richey Brooks
    began in mud: at Moneymore;
    ‘a place of mud and nothing else’
    he called it (not the way it looks,
    but what lies under those green hills?)
    Emigrated in ’74;
    ended in Drury: mud again –
    slipped in the duck-run at ninety-three
    (wouldn’t give up keeping poultry,
    always had to farm something).
    Caught pneumonia; died saying
    ‘Do you remember Martha Hamilton
    of the Oritor Road?’ – still courting
    the same girl in his mind. And she
    lived after him, fierce widow,
    in their daughter’s house; watched the plum tree –
    the gnarled, sappy branches, the yellow
    fruit. Ways of living and dying. 

The Voyage Out
    The weekly dietary scale
    per adult: pork and Indian beef,
    three pounds together; one of sugar,
    two of potatoes, three and a half
    of flour; a gill of vinegar;
    salt, pepper, a pint of oatmeal;
    coffee, two ounces, likewise tea;
    six of butter, suet, treacle,
    and, in the tropics, of