MRS NEVINES’ BIRD SANCTUARY, CO. ANTRIM

Mrs Nevines’ bird sanctuary looks at first
Like a meshed community of cages
Where birds get better – or worse,
End up in the world of her glass cases.

At second glance, a white-faced owl
Blinks and pivots at the neck
(From north-north-east to roughly south)
The two halves of a single cheek.

But look again, and what’s revealed
Of Mrs Nevines’ healing work
Is how the sparrow, too, must heal
Fenced in beside the sparrowhawk.

As close against the glint of night
Her stands of birds keep airless watch –
That held the mountains underfoot,
That circled slowly on the lough.

*

VALEDICTION

The roots of my habit
Inhabit the time
My father smoked
In the closed rooms of his lungs
When we were young
And could float
On blue carpets of smoke
That rose
From the mouth and nose
Of adults
Disclosing their invisible secrets.

Older now, and short of breath,
Those blue
Bravura clouds are gone –
I know the likelihood of death,
That in my mouth
A cigarette’s
The ectoplasm of a fraud
That all began when I was bored
And made a séance
Of a childhood trance.

Once, on reaching
For my father’s hand,
I woke
To realise he was dead
And took instead a cigarette,
As though,
To finally give it up,
I’d to let go
Of what I’d lost –
The rope of gently rising smoke
I tried
To hold his breathing ghost.

*

DEATH OF THE POLAR EXPLORERS

They made their grim, sad faces and went out,
Out into cold flurries of the snow, and ice,

And saw the glaciers perfecting time
In all their strange, enormous beauty. Doubt

Never stunned the marrow in their bones
Who rose above the merely physical,

And if they faltered, it was only once,
On finding death incomprehensible.

*

HITCHED

In the future, when we learn how to levitate,
No one will need the old contraptions,
The humming machines with wings and whirring
Propellers that made marriages work.

People will have got the knack
Of holding altitude in their thoughts
And, going into it with their eyes open,
Look to lower turbulence with their lashes.

But for now, deserving a good send off,
I’ll put a shoulder to the wheel
To help two people fly –

Bumping along, like in the old films,
With the delicate, bridal canopy,
Brought back to earth to get the hang of sky.

*

DEUTSCHE SCHULD

(For WG Sebald)

I

It’s easy to go wrong,
Learning the words in German
That sound English.

The sky is bedeckt –
With what?
Clouds?
Bedecked like flowers
On the Indian Juggernaut?
Or black with bombers
Swarming to the storms
Of red and orange?

Overcast. The sky is overcast.
And besides,
It’s easy to get by in English.

II

Where you get lost
Is the almost perfect normality
Of talking shop –
What happened?
Skip Hitler’s table talk,
What words do Germans use
For Holocaust?

Vernichtung.
Massenvernichtung.
Or, der Holocaust.
That’s a guest-word from the Greek
That we don’t use
For what you did to us.

Frankfurt. Dresden.
Completely burnt.

We bubbled on the pavements in our fat.

III

Looking back like Lot’s wife
On her stock,
You watch the fire-bombs on Hamburg
Dropped from Operation Gomorrah…

Hitler?
Er hat uns verhext.
He bankrupted us,
To a pillar of salt.

IV

Things froze.
Molten lead
That slipped through guttering
When the roof ran
Cooled to a wedge of metal
In the mouths of gargoyles.

How could we speak
To each other after that?
Blown backwards
From our tables
On our wings of ash?

V

We withdrew into ourselves.

With our history
We have to be careful.

Internal emigrants
Trudging nowhere,
Eyes glued to our boots.

We escaped
With nothing but our lives.
And our right to silence.

VI

On the roofs of buildings,
Mute, reconstructed angels –
Not victims now,
But witnesses.

VII

What do you do with your dead?
Between the morgues and memory?
Where they burned or lie buried
Under rubble, and monumental masonry
No longer speaks of destiny,
But fate?

I died
                                               Remember me
                             Lies here
      And over there…
                                                         The other side: da drüben.

Did they comb my hair?
Were there shoes on my feet?

We believed we would wake
But history stood on our chests,
And our foreheads were branded.

Being numberless,
The Angel passing over
Will not wake us.

VIII

Even the red of poppies is suspect.
Nature flourishing its inability to mourn
In camomile and couch grass,
Dung and hair. The grave sites
Grasbedeckt.

 *

MORNING LIGHT

When the resurrection opens your lid
Will it be like morning light,
And you confused you were ever dead?
Or will the Angel of thought,
Who all those years held you
In conversation, spring out
Of the spoiled cloth – huge
As a moth from the dust of an old suit?

*

BURMA

My mad uncle had the Burma jungle
In his head, burnt out tracts of history
He’d stalk in ambush of his sanity,
Becoming like the dead invisible.

An African, colonial invalid,
He hid from Independence in the bush,
Blinded to history like an Oedipus
On whom the Federal troops were billeted.

Biafra disappeared and so did he,
Still fighting out his fragment of world war;
And history, forgiving nothing,
Tore out its shrapnel from his memory.

*

STICK INSECT

If I come back as a burnt match,
My body bent with the effort of fire,

It was because I was struck
By a love that failed to blossom.

*

LIFE-CYCLE OF THE CABBAGE WHITE BUTTERFLY

Cabbage whites flutter Elsie’s summer heart –
She’s busy dissecting her men again,
Pinning them down on reproduction,
Spreading their wings with her wild laugh.

In their natural habitat, they stray
Like the horn-rimmed glasses on her face,
Magnifying the flowers they light on. Days
On end she traces the biology,

Prim as a bluestocking. As she’s black
It could be that she likes them under glass,
Examining for mixed motives the flaws
That turned their city-cousins ash-

Grey. She labels one Snow-in-Ghana,
As though she doesn’t trust her own desire.

*

THE SECOND LIFE OF SHELLS

(Inishark)

Long after the life’s gone out of them
Like ghosts of rain through a ruin,
Beached shells frame
A congealed absence –
Small-holdings of silence
Where the sea comes spilling in.