Poetry and images inspired by Belfast Geraldine Fitzgerald and Richard Sloan
Title page
Foreword
The Divide
From my bed I’d watch a star between the red brick houses as it blinked distant over Belfast Lough past Titanic’s dock a daytrip to the sea the end of the journey a glisten and promise a dive into the quenching freeze along from the Orange Hall
And church not the church behind closed doors mahogany shoe-polish brown always brown doors behind which candles smell of incense ours low we’d call it not Catholic no candles except at Christingle when you have to be sure not to set fire to Louise’s hair – the duet Brahms lullaby Louise singing sweetly and I hinge to her believing we’re rocking the cradle together and as I get older glances during the chorus of Jesus bids us shine from eyes that know more than I did After for the beauty of the earth I come home to the big fat moon
But I haven’t said goodbye The silent space of leaf drop Buttermilk Loney up the Horseshoe bend where bells still clang on Sundays up here among the hills which cradle river valley lough and shore a viewpoint once unsafe – long before then our visit a goat horns breathless giggles as the goat gores the door the wind has pushed us in from treeless hills in fingertip touch of the sky where we run freely before we are to know The leaf touches the ground down in the Lagan city years in the dark of our gardens–
Paras in the leaf drop
we fall from our youth into silence as the grey metal of the guns shadows the crouched figures sooted faces souls shining through their eyes
At the end of our Belfast garden the iron corrugated ribbed steel grey rises high above me They are beyond it I hear – from where I stand long deep green grass creeping towards the hedge bursting with fuchsia red blood red fuchsia with purple petals the colour of holiness from where thou shalt not comes To-day I sense the over there – over here the hills are sure Here the sunlight shields me from the ribbed iron face until the sun itself is obscured – then I’m over there knowing yet not knowing – struggling as the fuchsias spill
June We were too young to look after her she fell off the table we cried she was Ok On the eleventh did she walk across Agnes Street to see the bonfires was she not allowed to go past row after row of washed-step houses neatly stuck together from Cave Hill looking down A warm July evening the wall of the tall end house of the street bonfires piled high with broken chairs and the much-sat-at table with told stories farls eaten black tea drunk As the sun set over Cave Hill did she see the sky swept with peach and rosehip hear the bin lid women’s war cry dusk in the Ardoyne two policemen shot dead
Silent Valley
Avocets and ravens migration of birds all of this we talk about until he takes me back back across the water through the veiled shrapnel then everything closes in on this day of sapphire sky he takes me into the silence of the night birds on their northerly flight there’s his story and my story on the streets on the border where he went on patrol at the edge of fear I wanted to say sorry thank God for the mountains he said my few hours off walking up to the Mournes I wouldn’t ask a ghost the way in him I could see the young soldier crouched gun in hand in our front garden in the darkened evening that look I can see them now the whites of his eyes staring from his blackened face
Outside the chemist’s You saw something you shouldn’t have to see fright lightning from nowhere strike down hit the ground Who’s around? Where? Must see drawn to What? We’re drawn to the stretcher the bandage around her head young girl shot
Within our church walls The exclusion of light and light through the window the misunderstanding of understandings: squeezing together in the pew the blue of the end of the blue hour blue of the pulpit on which a spring lamb is embroidered – soft-faced people in a quiet chorus of muttering
Down Chapel Lane We’ll collect you and provide you with a personal escort the three ladies said to the can’t protect-herself-from-herself-woman sitting on her loaned coat on this Belfast street where it’s time for prayers time in holy shop alley the forbidden alley the years-ago alley the gunman’s alley the lookalike priest oh for the sleep waves of Ballintoy, the silence, I wanted to take a photo of it, the lookalike priest gave money to the man hunkered on the street opposite the chapel the priest went into the holy shop opposite the garden beside the chapel just down from the betting shop there was the icon at the end of the long-garden garden, beside the chapel, the don’t-look-down-there-garden there’s something-at-the-end-of-it-garden, in the grotto right here in the middle of the city, where in a minute I’ll be moving with ghosts in the city centre weaving in and out of memories, people from around the world seeing the soft edge of the sea and not the hard edge of the kelp store and touching my shoulder a soldier
Teresa for Teresa Godfrey And so I’d left not knowing the future only the past the boundaries the edge of them the leading to /the don’t go over what was beyond /who was on the other side It was you– You who were beyond my boundaries I with long tumbling hair, emerging from dark days – Would we have talked /walked together – not on a frontline Now there’s no need for a peace wall just a step, a stepping over/ years and the years we could not have met now river -flow
Armagh 1968
Through the woods in the moss forest deep into its interior by the unsteady tree certainty can be dangerous as you found in the streets Strange how the moss looks the same, as do we The dark in the forest full of uncertainty hard to see through to imagine how it would be to lean like the unsteady tree This wasn’t possible we moved in the dark you and me The dark in the moss forest is certain, I think Through times of uncertainty we walk by the unsteady tree to talk in the moss forest. We’ve moved out of the dark you and me
Disturbance On the streets grey streets – prejudice boredom the heat of a dry day no hope and no Pope – simmering discontent in the name of in the name of They’re catholics they’re prods between silences –in this street grains of dust bones disintegrated he said me Ma said