THE WAIT

STRANDED

My mother’s bones are like the bleached carcass of a cowwhale

who confused by signals in the Sound could not find the way to the open sea –

nature has no pity

all things are born, live, grow to maturity, die and rot

the gulls and crabs feed on the still-living flesh

the organs flop like large jellyfish onto the stained sand

and the embryo bristles and crusts in the sun and salt wind:

are memories still pregnant in the organism

a magnetic tape-recording of ultrasound waves

leading us through oceans and rites, and pain?

over and over like rolling sharks tearing of chunks of flesh

or does it all stop on a primeval shore

beneath a merging sky and barren rock?

my mother moves from point to point as was expected

sometimes losing her way in self-doubt and delusion

but always finding a passage through illness and despair

achieving only that which a living thing can truly achieve

and yet her greatness was not found in greatness

but in the biological fact of the life itself.

ANIMALS

All the animals are safely sleeping in their glass cases

neatly laid out in rows with the Roman soldiers

and the farm machinery

the lion bedding down with the Friesian cows

the oversized hippo with the giraffe

the low lights along the counter

and the streetlights from Broadway

giving them shadows like the transmigration of souls

from the disused churchyard across the road

in my hand is the exact money for the evening pink sports paper

as I run faster than any cheetah

along the stone wall that locks down the sunken graves

there is no one about –

the summer seats at the bandstand are empty

the doors on the banks are locked

the rain on the Tarmac gives the illusion of a river

flowing past the nude androgynous mannequins

in the clothes shop window

as the bank clock calls time on a time that is frozen

like the manikins in the living room of a council house

like the men drinking out time in brown and cream bars

like the boy wide-eyed with wonder

looking at the unaffordable array of animals in a toy shop

a wind-up crocodile snapping at a dragonfly on a wire

that is always just out of reach.

DIXON OF DOCK GREEN

Dixon of Dock Green was like my grandfather,

he never did much, but even the criminals respected him

his moody quietness, yet self-assured wisdom

and everyone knew who really was in charge of the station

like my grandfather talking to the men hunkered along the wall

at the back of the terraced houses

he reasoned that rashness led only to violence

his voice dulled and monotonous among the wire lines of washing

echoing in the arches of the entryways –

these were times of dread and unpredictably

men on rooftops firing indiscriminately into crowds of workers

coming through the shipyard gates and across the bridges

Dixon of Dock Green, black and white in his black and white uniform

stepping out of the London smog on a Saturday night

with his common-sense warnings and morals

into the living room and soon-to-start beginnings of our own Troubles:

my grandfather died in the house he lived in all his life

and said that words mean nothing, that words mean everything

that his generation created the history that would consume his grandchildren

like overlapping waves coming in from far out on a dark ocean –

and Dixon of Dock Green steps with his hands clasped behind his back

into the Goodnight, all, of personal histories.

THE DISAPPEARED

They look at you from makeshift notice-boards

on the walls of school assembly halls

temporary city halls, street hoardings

so many faces and sizes and fits

you try hard to focus on the individual

the young smiling student girl who is a lover

the set jaws of a petty civil servant

the grinning face of a highland peasant with broken teeth

pleased at the attention without understanding

the tough cityhood who is resigned with knowledge –

so many eyes, they seem to say as one,

You have forgotten us already.

Relatives have given-up scrutinizing official and unofficial records

for names and occupations that are still there

but left to mildew and fade like names on thousands of wooden markers

the smell of blocked drains

the polished marble of new public buildings

where, if you ask, they tell you with a shrug,

It’s impossible now

we’ll leave it open for a time to forget if not heal

the Government needs to put a line under it all

instead of leaving it raw

not least to spare the whiff of collaboration –

the people need to learn again to forget

in the re-cropped paddy fields they bend to work

wary of each uncertain step

and tell with a grin and nodding heads

how the pig meat has a peculiar taste.

THE WAIT

And it came underneath the double barrier

keeping to the middle of the road

the kit pinched from its warren

hanging by the scruff as if already dead

its legs dangling loosely.

The taste of warmth, of dung, and urine, and fear

the cat slowly climbed the steps

to a flat area in the front of the public toilets

where it gently left the kit where two walls met

then it lay a little distance

fully stretched on its back in the sun

one eye on its prey

the taste of hot brain, heart, and liver in its mouth.

It took three prods of my boot before the kit took flight

and as I stood in the doorway watched by a prowling cat

I was back again for the first time

the grey wet morning street

the thin railings round my grandmother’s house

a boy of ten, a covered saucepan of broth in my hands

looking down upon a shrunken head

under sour sheets.

MONDAY AFTERNOON

In the living room of the dying woman

the dull lamps are switched on

though it is only the afternoon –

she doesn’t know she is dying

she is sleeping the half-trance of the dying

she is aware of them walking around her

as though she were already dead

the tight bandages on her swollen legs

have not been changed

the pus seeps down into her socks

and she hears things slowing down

the hum of the fridge

the water in the cistern

the dull thump of her heart.

It is a grey bloodless afternoon

in the housing estate she grew up in

someone slams a delivery door

a dog barks like an unattended child

a mobile phone jingles like the future

but she is sailing away

down channels of memories so thick

that they cannot be penetrated

and the young slip of a home-help girl

is filling in forms

looking at her watch

as she has a sly smoke

while her daughter is screaming

at the children in the car

and her son is comatose at work

she sighs three times

and leaves it all behind.

Gary Allen is an award-winning Irish poet. He has published nineteen collections of poetry, most recently, 'Bonfire Night.' A new collection, 'Wing Walking,' and selected poems will be published next year in London. Widely published in literary magazines including Australian Book Review, Meajin, Quadrant, Westerly, etc.