EAST

EAST

EAST

I know it’s not playing Gaelic, it’s simply not good enough
to dismiss as someone else’s all that elemental Atlantic guff.
And to suggest that everything’s foreign beyond the proverbial pale
amounts to a classic case of hitting the head on the nail.
 
But give me a dreary eastern town that isn’t vaguely romantic,
where moon and stars are lost in the lights of the greyhound track
and cheering comes to nothing and a flurry of misplaced bets
blanketing the stands at dawn is about as spiritual as it gets.
 
Where back-to-back estates are peppered with satellite discs
and the sign of the Sunrise Takeaway doesn’t flick on until six
and billows from the brewery leave a February night for dead
and the thought of smoking seaweed doesn’t enter your head.
 
And while it’s taken for granted everyone has relatives in Chicago
who share their grandmother’s maiden name and seasonal lumbago,
it’s probably worth remembering, at the risk of committing heresy,
as many families in Seatown have people in Blackpool or Jersey.
 
My own grandmother’s uncle ran a Liverpool snooker hall
that cleaned up between the wars and went, of course, to the wall.
I must have a clatter of relatives there or thereabouts still
who have yet to trace their roots and with any luck never will.
 
I know there’s a dubious aunt on my father’s side in Blackburn,
a colony on my mother’s in Bury called something like Bird or Horn.
I have a cousin, a merchant seaman based in darkest St. Ives,
another who came on the seventies for Man. Utd. reserves.
 
If you’re talking about inheritance, let me put it this way:
there’s a house with umpteen bedrooms and a view of Dundalk Bay
that if I play it smoothly will be prefaced by the pronoun ‘my’
when the old man decides to retire to that big after hours in the sky.
 
If it comes down to allegiance and a straight choice between
a trickle of shingly beaches that are slightly less than clean
and the rugged western coastline draped in visionary mystique,
give me the likes of Bray or Bettystown any day of the week.
 
If it’s just a question of water and some half-baked notion
that the Irish mind is shaped by the passionate swell of the ocean,
I align myself to a dibble sea that’s unspectacular, or flat.
Anything else would be unthinkable. It’s as simple as that.