Hands that aged round ashplants and cane sticks

And lapped the spurs on a lifetime of gamecocks

Harked to their gift and worked with fine intent

Until your fingers moved somnambulant:

I tell and finger it like braille,

Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable,

And if I spy into its golden loops

I see us walk between the railway slopes

Into an evening of long grass and midges,

Blue smoke straight up, old beds and ploughs in hedges,

An auction notice on an outhouse wall –

You with a harvest bow in your lapel,

Me with the fishing rod, already homesick

For the big lift of these evenings, as your stick

Whacking the tips off weeds and bushes

Beats out of time, and beats, but flushes

Nothing: that original townland

Still tongue-tied in the straw tied by your hand.

The end of art is peace

Could be the motto of this frail device

That I have pinned up on our deal dresser –

Like a drawn snare

Slipped lately by the spirit of the corn

Yet burnished by its passage, and still warm.

In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge

killed in France 31 July 1917

The bronze soldier hitches a bronze cape

That crumples stiffly in imagined wind

No matter how the real winds buff and sweep

His sudden hunkering run, forever craned

Over Flanders. Helmet and haversack,

The gun’s firm slope from butt to bayonet,

The loyal, fallen names on the embossed plaque –

It all meant little to the worried pet

I was in nineteen forty-six or seven,

Gripping my Aunt Mary by the hand

Along the Portstewart prom, then round the crescent

To thread the Castle Walk out to the strand.

The pilot from Coleraine sailed to the coal-boat.

Courting couples rose out of the scooped dunes.

A farmer stripped to his studs and shiny waistcoat

Rolled the trousers down on his timid shins.

Francis Ledwidge, you courted at the seaside

Beyond Drogheda one Sunday afternoon.

Literary, sweet-talking, countrified,

You pedalled out the leafy road from Slane

Where you belonged, among the dolorous

And lovely: the May altar of wild flowers,

Easter water sprinkled in outhouses,

Mass-rocks and hill-top raths and raftered byres.

I think of you in your Tommy’s uniform,

A haunted Catholic face, pallid and brave,

Ghosting the trenches like a bloom of hawthorn

Or silence cored from a Boyne passage-grave.

It’s summer, nineteen-fifteen. I see the girl

My aunt was then, herding on the long acre.

Behind a low bush in the Dardanelles

You suck stones to make your dry mouth water.

It’s nineteen-seventeen. She still herds cows

But a big strafe puts the candles out in Ypres:

‘My soul is by the Boyne, cutting new meadows …

My country wears her confirmation dress.’

‘To be called a British soldier while my country

Has no place among nations…’ You were rent

By shrapnel six weeks later. ‘I am sorry

That party politics should divide our tents.’