We Take Our Children to Ireland

What will they remember best? The barbed wire

still looped around the Belfast airport,

the building-high Ulster murals—

but those were fleeting, car window sights,

more likely the turf fires lit each night,

the cups of tea their father brought

and the buttered soda farls, the sea wall

where they leaped shrieking into the Irish Sea

and emerged, purpling, to applause;

perhaps the green castle at Carrickfergus,

but more likely the candy store

with its alien crisps—vinegar? they ask,

prawn cocktail? Worcestershire leek?

More certainly still the sleekly syllabled

odd new words, gleet and shite,

and grand responses to everyday events:

How was your breakfast? Brilliant.

How's your crust? Gorgeous.

Everything after that was gorgeous,

brilliant. How's your gleeted shite?

And the polite indictment from parents

everywhere, the nicely dressed matrons

pushing prams, brushing away their older kids

with a Fuck off, will ye? Which stopped

our children cold. Is the water cold,

they asked Damian, before they dared it.

No, he said, it's not cold, it's

fooking cold, ye idjits.

And the mundane hyperbole of rebuke—

you little puke, I'll tear your arm off

and beat you with it, I'll row you out to sea

and drop you, I'll bury you in sand

and top you off with rocks—

to which the toddler would contentedly nod

and continue to drill his shovel

into the sill. All this will play on

long past the fisherman's cottage and farmer's

slurry, the tall hedgerows lining the narrow

drive up the coast, the most beautiful

of Irish landscapes indelibly fixed

in the smeared face of two-year-old Jack—

Would you look at that, his father said

to Ben and Zach, shite everywhere, brilliant.

Gorgeous, they replied. And meant it.

LYNNE MCMOHAN