On Devenish I heard a snipe And the keeper’s recital of elegies Under the tower. Carved monastic heads Were crumbling like bread on water.

the cud of memory allayed for once, arbitration of the feud placated, imagining those under the hill

On Boa the god-eyed, sex-mouthed stone Socketed between graves, two-faced, trepanned, Answered my silence with silence. A stoup for rain water. Anathema.

Now as news comes in of each neighbourly murder we pine for ceremony, customary rhythms:

The line lifted, hand Over fist, cold sunshine On the water, the land Banked under fog: that morning I was taken in his boat,

the procession drags its tail out of the Gap of the North as its head already enters the megalithic doorway.

Sometimes, on the high stool, Too busy with his knife At a tobacco plug And not meeting my eye, In the pause after a slug He mentioned poetry.

the great chambers of Boyne, prepare a sepulchre under the cupmarked stones. Out of side-streets and bye-roads

But my tentative art His turned back watches too: He was blown to bits Out drinking in a curfew Others obeyed, three nights After they shot dead The thirteen men in Derry.

My tongue moved, a swung relaxing hinge. I said to her, ‘What will become of us?’ And as forgotten water in a well might shake At an explosion under morning

purring family cars nose into line, the whole country tunes to the muffled drumming

On Devenish I heard a snipe And the keeper’s recital of elegies Under the tower. Carved monastic heads Were crumbling like bread on water.

Their puffed knuckles had unwrinkled, the nails were darkened, the wrists obediently sloped.

in tainted rooms, their eyelids glistening, their dough-white hands shackled in rosary beads.

By God, the old man could handle a spade. Just like his old man.

He had gone miles away For he drank like a fish Nightly, naturally Swimming towards the lure Of warm lit-up places, The blurred mesh and murmur Drifting among glasses In the gregarious smoke.

Once I carried him milk in a bottle Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up To drink it, then fell to right away

Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests. I’ll dig with it.

Dawn-sniffing revenant, Plodder through midnight rain, Question me again.

behind me. And always, in a corner, the coffin lid, its nail-heads dressed