Children

Children in ill-fitting uniforms
drive adults to school, and children 
argue the cost of tobacco 
in the Newsagent’s nearby.

You must have noticed them.

And in the mornings they rise to slaughter pigs,
cook breakfast, solve crosswords at the office ... 
Or they send tiny adults into minefields, 
barefoot, with pictures
of Khomeini around their necks,
their old toes searching the sand
for death.

And children queue for Bingo 
on Ormond Quay, on Mary Street, 
and douse their leaking take-aways with vinegar.

And children talk and smoke incessantly
in Eastern Health Board waiting rooms,
always moving one seat to the right, 
someone’s parents squabbling over trinkets
on the worn linoleum. 

And it is always children 
who will swear for their tobacco—children
with beards and varicose veins—
and children, dressed as policemen, 
who pull their first corpses from the river.

And who is it who makes love in the dark
or in the light, who haunts
and who does all our dying for us,
if not children?

We leave their fingerprints 
on everything we touch.

Let’s Die

‘Let’s die,’ I say to my kids,
Lee aged five, Luca not yet three,
and under an August blanket of sun
we stretch out in the grass on a hill

to listen to the sea below us
drawing close, pulling back,
while the sheep on the hills all around
crunch their way down towards earth.

‘Do you love the clouds, Dada?’
‘Do you love the Pink Panther?’
and ‘Will you stay with us for ever?’
to which I reply, without hesitation,
Yes, Yes and Yes again,
knowing that as long as we lie here
everything is possible, that any of the paths
up ahead might lead anywhere
but still, just in time, back home.

Like me, sometimes they act too much,
fill the available space and time 
with fuss and noise and argument,
but up here, overlooking the landscape,
the seascape, of their lives, on this hill
they like to play this game, to lie
together and together to die
which, in their children’s language, means
less to expire or to cease
than to switch to Super Attention Mode,
to prepare for travel, to strap oneself
into the booster seat and wait and wait
for the gradual but inexorable lift 
off and up and out into motion. 

For my two boys, things are only 
recently made flesh, made mortal—
our uprooted palm tree, two goldfish,
the bird a neighbour’s cat brought down
last week—and they are almost holy 
with this knowledge. ‘Let’s die now, 
then let’s go home for tea,’ Lee says,
putting into words as best he can
the sea’s, and our, love affair with the land.

Tent

Maurice has lost his virginity
in a tent, or so he claims, out beyond
the new hotel with a foreign girl
who happened to be hitching through.

When the jeering has at last died down,
most of us grin, kick at the earth
or stare into the middle distance, shy
of being the first to give himself away.

That evening, like tourists on a trail
to some historic battleground, we troop
all the way out, the full mile or more
to the now famous field where the girl is

long since gone, though yes there does appear
to be a faint impression in the grass: 
rectangular, for all the world like a door
and big enough for a man to pass through.

Driving into History

Once in a while, morning sunshine
filtered through the peeling paint and rust
of that old black banger, perched
like a stylite up on concrete blocks

in our back garden. The seats were torn, 
the wooden dashboard was an altar to insect death,
and yet my first boyhood trips into the world
were in that wheel-less, if not quite lifeless wreck.

But since they took the garden to build a bypass
to our once congested, now double-bypassed town,
I dream little of either speed or novelty
and, truth to tell, I scarcely know the names

of all these cars out here. Now all I wish 

is time enough for them to age and rust,
to end up up on blocks in some child’s life,
twentieth century coins down behind their seats,
their vacant windscreens open to the light.

All poems, with the exception of "Let’s Die," taken from New and Selected Poems (Dedalus Press, 2007) with permission.