Masks

- Travelling on the Larne-Stranraer Ferry -

Loudmouthed and boisterous
As school-boys out of uniform the
Home-going unit entered the lounge,
Close-cropped and warily lean as
Criminals. But I in their midst
Pretended absorption in the Irish News,
Aware I too was branded alien.
One sat beside me, and I at once
Remembering the ancestral defilement
Of my land and people dutifully recoiled.
Then he offered me a cigarette,
And as if for the first time I saw a
Lad from a Galloway farm, a chapter
Of our tormented Ulster story agonised and
Writhing in his childish eyes. We smoked
Together and painfully I read how he
Laughed with assumed bravado at my suggestion
Of his terror under sniper fire on a
Belfast street patrol. Now sometimes I
Feel a great lonesomeness for I know that
In that single splinter of eternity I’d met
A boy who could have been my son.

Brian Monaghan

Post Booby-Trap

Across the bloated meadow in the rain-shine
I watched a row of stooping troopers go
-As quiet garments bobbing on a clothesline
In the savage evening glow.

They seemed a row of gleaning harvesters,
Each man’s harvest-bag a-bulge with grain.
But the crop they garnered was a flesh one-
Lacerated parts-that-make-a man, and bits of brain.

Then in the denseness of the dreeping overhead
The helicopters whined like maddened flies
An elegy for all the helpless loved ones
Slain on the altar of an Ulster sacrifice.

Brian Monaghan