Exiles

Exiles

Exiles

1. Girl from the East, Palmerstown traffic-lights

She swings between steaming morning cars,
one trouser leg doubled back above the knee,
her main business, The Big Issue, clamped
beneath her elbow. A squall of snow
bears down just when the eye is drawn
to the omission: a metal pin, her stiff bird gait,
a crutch. A cloak of ice billows over windscreens,
bullets of hail lodge in folds of her blown-back
hood. Her forehead is knotted against such force
that shreds air    sky    time
                A single footprint, clone of the one
before, visible on the ground, and black discs in snow
from her crutch, like inverted commas before
and after every footprint, track the script
of her labour.
                Drivers in snoozing cars register the matter,
faces inscrutable, stall briefly at the gleaming pin,
the raw air below her thigh. Somewhere
in Romanian earth,
               the molecules of her incinerated limb have
               reformed.
               Here, she is at war with deficit.


2. Alex in the Garden

In his homeland, a builder. In Ireland,
he sweeps the piled sheddings in my mother’s garden,
the sinewy fen of his body spreading to reach
lacey drifts from lime, sycamore, larch.

When he weeds, he scoops beneath the roots,
leaving no evidence of a plant’s history; when
he paints a trellis, it is saintly, Vilnius white.
On Sunday evenings, icons appear in the open
rhombus spaces between crossed slats of wood:
St Stephen, other martyrs. In the field above
the house, a stoat flashes, white as snow.

He leaves Koruna chocolate, photographs of his wife
and daughters flaying birch-branches after sauna,
himself on cross-country skis. His whiteness struggles
for survival in the red speech of our North, he
tries to match his landscape to the stranger’s, pondering
aloud, ‘What is this number, this number ee-yit?’

He has shaped shrubs like Eastern spires nestling
in snow, thick-shouldered and undauntable. But
when my father died, he shed fat tears
at the wake, they flowed unashamed,
watering his roots and ours.


3.The Final Shrug

The Russians have come, the world has not stopped.
Ivory-cheeked, blond, their blue eyes blaze
with things we never knew. They shop decisively
for cut-price familiars: beetroot and celeriac,

horseradish, tinned pork, violent mustard.
Their fertility makes a boisterous fire.
The Russians have come, rangy as wolves,
their mouths and wide eyes, their busy movement

stoking a pain we may not wish to feel.
Neither pilgrims, nor helpless, their shopping
is a choreographed dance away from one-roomed
apartments, from dachas, hunts by night, peasants and hounds

working as equals. We wait in the check-out queue,
trolleys creaking with packs of German biscuits, rye
bread, Polish beer. Regard our unsacred lurch away
from history, as we wait, and wait. See the

dark font of legendary slops, our efficient handling
of what we have learned together. The Russians have come.
They are with us as we shrug it all away, the old pain
of never having, the empty cupboard, the unfed hounds

of our countries howling at the moon for something, anything.


4. Old Roman Towns

The roof tiles on the new extension
are the colour of crushed peaches

grown in the foothills of a volcano.
Inside, men twist pipes, steel girders

support the ceiling. What drew us
to break walls, adding height and light?

This is a necessary space,
the new romance of brick and stone

we hankered for twenty years ago,
in Yugoslavia. We looked down

from the hills on old Roman towns,
drank in the mineralised heat

that radiated from the roof-tiles.
This was how to live, we thought: passionate

beneath a roof the colour of rich earth,
overlooking cobbles where people

met at evening near the sound
of an antique fountain.

Now we know differently.
it was not, after all, how to live,

as tribes of the Balkans drowned
in blood. So, in the speckled wars,

slouching beasts tearing the earth,
what drew us to rebuild? We extend

ourselves closer to birch and ash,
hearts more urgent than ever as the wind

rolls in from the west. What jeopardy
inside these walls and windows,

whiskey on the table,
bare feet stretched to the night fire?


5. Poetry Reading, Irish-Polish Society, Fitzwilliam Place
evening of the 60th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz

The signs are auspicious: twisted brass supports
a chandelier, a hanging, ochred basin.
Bulbs glow within. On the walls, a crimson phoenix,
a huddled Polish farmhouse in black and white.
To my left, an iconic Mother of Christ, in blue,
gold and red. The fireplace tiles are blood-hued.
Whisperers gather, as if in church.

We smile our greetings, a city’s oddities caring little
for race and pace, the fashion and passion
of the street, pinned together, genteel and awkward:
men with antique ponytails, women in baroque skirts,
safe in this chamber where all is liberation.
When the poets unleash the wolf of the imagination,
our ghost selves float above polder and plain,

over successions of invaders, where things happened
in secret. While the Irish railway shunted trippers
between towns and cities, Poland’s chemin de fer
led standing millions to the chambers, unseen.
Yellow eyes, perhaps, witnessed death on the long poles
of smoke, would sometimes have drawn closer
to the rank odour of flesh not raw.

With us now, they wake in our minds again,
guardians of the unpaceable horizon, seekers
of crooked paths, far from the solution-makers.
In dreams, nothing is final and blood does not spill
behind averted backs: it washes, tidal, through the days,
warming and cooling to love’s barometric fevers
as men fill wombs and children are born,

despite risen spectres, the unquiet ache
of a cut people. Later, there is tea, coffee, praise
for the poets, praise for fidelity. Knowing what can
go wrong, we choose oddness. Out of tune and time,
we file into the ashen night, opt for the long, drawn, note,
the howl in the wilderness. Hair-shirted in the cold,
we find a gift of bees, honey, the dripping, golden, combs.