Far from her nest the lapwing cries away:
My heart prays for him though my tongue do curse.
SHAKESPEARE
A Comedy of Errors
Magowan the poet, who might have been Irish,
of one sort or another, Mac an Ghabhann,
making his way in another disputed borderland,
wearing another mask, north of the south, west of the rain.
A blew in, a run-in, sometimes adrift on a black sea
of sweet black stout, with his companions the captain
and the navigator, whose identitites
may or may not ever be revealed.
A ragged country, the roads under fog,
small towns and their flags of allegiance:
Prod. Taig. No Bigot Parade. No Pope. No RUC.
No Agreement. Dungevin supports Garvaghey Road.
No visible border, the miles shift into kilometres,
the signs into script, everywhere stone, stone,
mountains and scree, and the lough suddenly,
a long bolt of blue in the sheer sunlight.
Within him he fancies there was always a Donegal man
butting out from Inishowen, head into the wind
that bears off the Atlantic from the edge of the known world,
northwest corner of the continent of Europe.
Where the neighbours don’t like each other much,
here as elsewhere. Ah, the Donegal Liar.
What does he know? He’s on the road,
looking for lost uncles, out finding his lost self.
A singer, a fumbling romantic, wanderer,
chickencraw. And in him always the other:
the settler, the stranger, the foreigner,
Thirty years before that asking who was that man
who was my father, a man whose life was all
a bad mood, most of that a bad temper,
whose first glimpse of the light was here in Buncrana?
In that town there was a dream night after night
of the wind and a loud knocking at my door,
over and over, and someone calling my name
up the B&B stairs and the rain over the lough.
At this point nothing is certain, little known.
Whether our man comes back changed from a journey
or whether he learns nothing, thereafter sifting
memory’s scraps, silence, the blue moody sky.
In Grant’s pub they have on the IRA tapes,
just for our benefit: Have you no homes to go to,
have you no homes of your own? Oh the English,
they’d steal the crack of the plate and the plate.
I can’t argue with you there boys but I’d love to.
Are you a spy? What’s your cover?
How long have you been with the British Army?
This with your father and your mother is bollocks anyway.
800 years of this and the rain. The people
you’re after are all drunk and have no money.
Our man concludes a pub is a bad place
to begin researching his ancestors. This pub.
What is he with a name like Smith and his granny a McGrory?
Is he a left footer or a right for the sake of Jesus,
Mary and Joseph, not to mention St Bridie
and St Patrick that we thought cast out all the bloody snakes?
Maybe he’ll go live in Cool Boy north of Letterkenny
and make fishing the whole of his story. Maybe not.
He could believe all he’s told: the rock somewhere there
where the priest’s head cut by the redcoat’s sword.
Bounced. Three times. To this day where it struck
the grass does not grow, the man swears it,
that and the other stone Wolf Tone was chained to
Somewhere hereabouts by the long lake of shadows,
where the submarines sulk, sunk deep
in radio silence, watching each other. And there’s a tree there
cannot be cut down. Men that tried it had sudden bad luck.
All that’s certain in my case: a few names, a few dates,
the old man’s certificates: birth, marriage, death,
all there is of him. John Patrick. John Smith.
And what manner of a name might that be?
I thought if he was someone else who then might I be?
If he could change I could, I too could be anyone,
anyone at all under the stars, Magowan for instance,
a worker in metal, McGrory, McGroary, McGroy.
His silence was absolute, nothing again nothing,
maybe he knew nothing, shuddered in sleep
in a dream over and over of nuns like angry bees
in a hive he can’t get out of, though whether in his sleep
or my own I don’t know, never will now,
till he’s kicked down the wooden stairs
to the door for the last time, and thereafter
the nothing at all he remembered.
Out on his own. Out on his ear at ten years
one month, from then a working man,
most of his days an itinerant unlettered landless labourer,
a spalpeen in the English north country counting pennies.
Asked, he’d blaze into anger, subside into long silence,
till we buried him, weary, still angry,
angry for ever under the great map of the stars.
Unfinished, as everything is. As this is.