For the burn of the paid-out ropes to cool,

Their slight lightheadedness and incredulity

To pass, those ones who had known him all along.

Human Chain

for Terence Brown

Seeing the bags of meal passed hand to hand

In close-up by the aid workers, and soldiers

Firing over the mob, I was braced again

With a grip on two sack corners,

Two packed wads of grain I’d worked to lugs

To give me purchase, ready for the heave –

The eye-to-eye, one-two, one-two upswing

On to the trailer, then the stoop and drag and drain

Of the next lift. Nothing surpassed

That quick unburdening, backbreak’s truest payback,

A letting go which will not come again.

Or it will, once. And for all.

from Route 110

for Anna Rose

I

In a stained front-buttoned shopcoat –

Sere brown piped with crimson –

Out of the Classics bay into an aisle

Smelling of dry rot and disinfectant

She emerges, absorbed in her coin-count,

Eyes front, right hand at work

In the slack marsupial vent

Of her change-pocket, thinking what to charge

For a used copy of Aeneid VI.

Dustbreath bestirred in the cubicle mouth

I inhaled as she slid my purchase

Into a deckle-edged brown paper bag.

III

Once the driver wound a little handle

The destination names began to roll

Fast-forward in their panel, and everything

Came to life. Passengers

Flocked to the kerb like agitated rooks

Around a rookery, all go

But undecided. At which point the inspector

Who ruled the roost in bus station and bus

Separated and directed everybody

By calling not the names but the route numbers,

And so we scattered as instructed, me

For Route 110, Cookstown via Toome and Magherafelt.

XII

And now the age of births. As when once

At dawn from the foot of our back garden

The last to leave came with fresh-plucked flowers

To quell whatever smells of drink and smoke

Would linger on where mother and child were due

Later that morning from the nursing home,

So now, as a thank-offering for one

Whose long wait on the shaded bank has ended,

I arrive with my bunch of stalks and silvered heads

Like tapers that won’t dim

As her earthlight breaks and we gather round

Talking baby talk.

‘The door was open and the house was dark’

in memory of David Hammond

The door was open and the house was dark

Wherefore I called his name, although I knew

The answer this time would be silence

That kept me standing listening while it grew

Backwards and down and out into the street

Where as I’d entered (I remember now)

The streetlamps too were out.

I felt, for the first time there and then, a stranger,

Intruder almost, wanting to take flight

Yet well aware that here there was no danger,

Only withdrawal, a not unwelcoming

Emptiness, as in a midnight hangar

On an overgrown airfield in late summer.

In the Attic