– Seán Ó Ríordáin
Their day never to come, they have gone to the wall.
Like holy beggars, they seem to have lost all will.
Their love affair with the future has made them ill,
the people who speak neither English nor Irish
and stand the ground only they could cherish
by the gable end of the last house of the parish,
shouldering their burden not to be borne,
the people who are neither native nor foreign.
Somewhere among these streets my mother was born
and now I too return to prod at the past,
content if I can be the unnoticed guest
and drop dead letters to myself in the post,
delivered and thrown away at the gable end
as I must have been, to end up lost and found
sharing my postcode with the rain and wind.
I paint myself into the tightest corner
and, though I could not be a slower learner,
mouth the slogans on each flag and banner
that I might join the gable end people
at last, surrendering to their appeal
and saying a prayer beneath their dreary steeple,
though they believe in neither Church nor God
but only the straw on which they make their bed,
outcast on the world. Yet they seem glad.
And we too are glad, making ourselves at home
among the averted gaze, the grating hymn,
the shout in the backstreet, the sanctified harm,
the shopping centre and the tourist trail:
security discreet; all of it real,
only our appetite for it still on trial,
and the signs in which we saw it all foretold –
Quis Separabit, What We Have We Hold –
urgently redundant, self-fulfilled
like us and fading as we lose all will,
our day come and gone, the pair of us still
with nowhere to shelter but this gable wall.
Copyright: David Wheatley
By kind permission of the author and The Gallery Press, Loughcrew, Oldcastle, County Meath, Ireland from “Mocker” (2006)
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