Photo by Laura M. Slatkin, 2016 Paris
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Belfast
Your velvet hills came to me
last night in the pool
how they hugged the fraught city
the pubs filled and buzzing
the Europa unbombed now for years.
Your political murals are kitsch
and history’s a ditch
for lying if we let
the gravediggers
name us. Let’s bury
our pseudonyms
all undisclosed.
Was Scarlett O’Hara’s father
a blustering Ulsterman
or was he a peasant
like granddad from Wicklow
tender and fond amidst the riot
and kind to his slaves
but for the obvious?
White people are weird
with their vitamin D
and sunravaged skin.
So far from an equator
it’s hard to walk the line
in a cleaved world.
Orange, green, navy blue
the colors are weapons
as were some horses
in the 19th century.
Freed by machines
see how they race
on fragile ankles—
beauty a late flower
of disuse. Your storefronts
were boarded, your university
Victorian, the linen quarter
defunct. The solid brick
that shelters us unmortared
smashed a window.
Your sky hung low your beer
rode high your visiting Masons
sober and punctual.
A Days Inn here
is a Days Inn anywhere
but for the marchers gathering
their ribbons’ gaud at odds
with their drawn gaunt faces
shut like a purse
around an old watch
that still keeps time
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Maureen N. McLane is a poet, memoirist, critic, and educator. She has published seven books of poetry, including This Blue, Finalist for the National Book Award. She is also the author of an experimental hybrid of memoir and criticism (My Poets), two monographs on British romantic poetics, and numerous essays on romantic-era and contemporary literature and culture. Her poems have been translated into Italian, French, Greek, Spanish, and Czech. Her most recent book is More Anon: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021); her next book, What You Want: poems, will be out in spring 2023 from FSG. She is the Henry James Professor in English and American Letters at New York University. [“Belfast” is from This Blue, FSG 2014]
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Belfast mural
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Author: Terence Winch
