Bellaghy churchyard, County Derry

Because I know the territory

And have lived here

All these years, by my own lights,

I let myself in by rights

But carefully, lest my presence

Breed disquiet.

A raised catafalque

Of clay, a chain-link fence

Your self-defence

From the living shadow

Of the dispossessed,

The critic in the long grass

Of Arcadia. Birds in a bush,

The twittering mesh

Of the inarticulate

In mist-nets, skeins

Of language, brought to hand

In no-man’s land . . . For your pains,

Thank you. And for leaving,

This side of the grave,

Lough Neagh, my Land under Wave,

The Toome shore

And the yet-to-be-explored

Immensities of Doss,

The burning glass

Of water widening to a lens

Or a loss of innocence –

Love-cars, Sunday afternoons

Of too much knowledge, too soon,

The knowledge of death . . . /

Behind the senses,

Knowledge stripped of all that myth

Of history, hope and future tenses –

Acid jazz, the concrete bulk

And small-hours nightclub razzmatazz

That is still The Elk,

The haulage thundering east and west

In juggernauts of driven power

And spiritual exhaust . . .

“When Master Pollock’s bagpipes play

Outside, it must be rain.”

Maybe once, but not again

In the drinking-dens

Of Cranfield, Grange and Moneyglass

And the sheep-pens

High in the Sperrins, rattling tin

As a ghost might rattle a door,

Invite himself back in

To the middle ground

Of Ulster, the daily round

This Monday morning, no-one about,

Where time to spare,

A one-sided conversation

With the dead, is mine to share,

Who have been everywhere

But home, with the fleshers,

Eelmen, buried here,

The cattle doctors, way back when,

The Scullions, the Lavertys,

The haulier MacErlean,

The Heaneys, Devlins, set in stone,

The local names, to whom, one day,

I just may add my own.

Harry Clifton

Harry Clifton's most recent poetry collections are The Holding Centre and The Winter of Captain Lemass (both published by Bloodaxe Books)