Man on Bus, Afflicted

Tall and slightly stooped, his coat
stained and soiled around the cuffs
he wears a heavy cardigan
although it's summer and this bus
is packed full of commuters but
he finds a vacant seat, then turns
his head and presses hard his forehead
tight against the windowframe:

I'm sorry now I ever left home
I wish to God I'd never left home
I wish to God I'd never left home
Oh I wish to God I'd never left home...

This bus becomes his congregation
hushed to these his orisons,
the child who plays at driver told
be quiet, shush: we hold our breaths.
Already his sad voice is climbing
down inside the heavy coat,
his words already clattering down
inside our long-abandoned wells.

I'm sorry now I ever left home
I wish to God I'd never left home…

He draws the last vowel out like one
who holds a lover's hand until
the moment comes to leave. And we
hold on to uprights, sides of seats,
or shopping bags or hand of child --
old wells have slippery sides where hand
or foot can take no firm hold
above forgotten darknesses.

I'm sorry now I ever left home
I wish to God I'd never left home…

We help each other out with nods
and whispers. Pity walks the aisle
and sits beside him. Riding high
above the wires and roofs outside,
his face returns his stare. And there
is something in his voice that speaks
of love. And something in his eye
is always sleepless, seeking, searching.

I'm sorry now I ever left home
I wish to God I'd never left home
I wish to God I'd never left home
Oh, I wish to God I'd never left home
I'm sorry now I ever left home
I wish to God I'd never left home
I wish to God I'd never left home
Oh, I wish to God I'd never left home...

To the Memory of Edward Tenison, DD., and to the Glorious Resurrection of St Mary's Church, Dublin, as a Decorating Centre.

"The Church's Restoration
In eighteen-eighty-three
Has left for contemplation
Not what there used to be...

" From 'Hymn' by John Betjeman

To the memory of the Right Reverend Father in God
Edward Tenison DD, late Lord Bishop of Ossory,
departed this life November 29, 1735 AD
in his 62nd year and whose plaque looks down
on the best ceramic tiles available in Dublin's city
centre: designs arrived just newly from Italy and Spain
in all good brands of quality (there's Kalebodur,
Kleine and Pilkington), this poem is dedicated.

Many a Sunday did the faithful decorate themselves
and sit in pews to parley with their Lord -- Yea,
would they come together decking out the soul
in colours pleasing to Him, led by Edward Tenison,
his representative on earth. Yea, would they climb
their voices past the highest organ note, past
curtain rails and satins 60 inches wide,
past facingboard and every paint and stain and shade

the modern soul finds needful, nay, finds balm
to spirits pealed and stripped and sanded yearly: Oh,
lift up your hearts and psalm the wallpapers of suburbia
and walk with me in heaven, feast on tasteful decors,
double-glazing, sunken lighting, sliding doors --
These hallowed boards you tread year after year now bend
beneath their rows of sealant, stacks of grouting pastes and curious implements designed to paint a ceiling

without splash; and all your sermons stashed somewhere
that God has rented out to store such truck as time
has shelved for good. They were for Good. They were for God!
But even He, in His divine, unguarded moments
fain would throw them out (His mansions too could do
with some refurbishment) but can't. (They're Edward's. Edward
Tenison's. One can't). So let poor churchmice gnaw
long into night until they break a tooth on lines

that dwell uncompromisingly upon the need
to sweep clean every crack and cleft and dusty shelf
and fling wide open every aperture will welcome
Grace of God. Remember, Edward, all those doubts
you nursed long winter nights beside your Ann (beloved
and commemorated here too) telling
over and again how it is said the Kingdom
of the Good will never fail, an we but rise

each morning bent on the remaking of ourselves
and all this world. See, Edward, Heaven come on earth
around you: method, mean and mechanism (all
in handy packs) to smooth the rough, rebuild again
the fallen, stem the grim disintegration all
our masonry is heir to. Yea, verily I say:
t he lion of solemn evening vespers here lies down
beside the lamb of pelmets, curtains and Swish-rail.

A can of outdoor emulsion, please. And, oh yeah, a brush.

Early Lessons in Divine Intent

(Young people, evening, Clonsilla Road)

When I was young, and stumbling towards myself
and finding how to fit my tongue to words,
I learned to call them 'mongols', those strange people
my grandmother said were touched by God
and sent among us to recall our loss
when Adam's knowledge cost us Paradise.

Those early faces held for me no trace
of Ghengis Khan, nor all his race that over-ran
an empire. But my post-war picture-books
incited hate of suicidal Japs
who Zero-dived American Destroyers,
screaming warcries out of angled cockpits.

I suffused those narrowed eyes with evil
until, years later, old war-footage woke
in me a raging hurt for those who drank
the ritual libation, tied the scarf
around their temples, told the sacred prayer,
ascended their irrevocable skies.

And now this evening all my childyears burst
their casements where they've long been stored &

And down the path they come, my long-lost 'mongols',
flooding out from forests now they've heard
my wars are done and I am home again
among her words intended kindly to describe them.
In woollen caps they come, their voices bright
like birds, each one an earnest of God's plan

to people out a colony in space
where man, made in His image, lived
in innocence with stars and moon and sun
suspended in the firmament as lanterns
for his day and night, where Providence
supplied the needs of simple, deathless life.

Triptych: Acts of War

Portadown 1999
Fire-blackened house front,
uniformed police, curious onlookers…

Here is a man. Here is his friend.
The man and his friend are talking.
Here is a car.
The man and his friend get into the car.
The car is moving. The car stops.
The man and his friend are walking.
The man has a brick.
The man's friend has a little pipe.

Here is a house.
Here is an old man.
Here is an old woman.
The old man and the old woman watch television.
The old man says he is tired.
The old man says he will go to bed.
The old woman says she will go soon.
The old man goes to bed.

The man is in the garden.
The man's friend is at the gate.
The man throws the brick.
The man runs back to the gate.
The man's friend is in the garden.
The man's friend throws the little pipe.
The man's friend runs back to the gate.
The car is at the gate.

The brick is on the floor.
The little pipe is on the floor.
The old woman picks up the little pipe
The old woman opens the door.
The old

(In sad memory of the elderly lady killed by a pipe bomb at her home in Portadown, June 1999)

II. Gibraltar 1988

The Fusiliers' Arch, the Rock of Gibraltar, pavements, scattered bodies…

That day they shot your face away, Mairead,
I walked in Stephen's Green. I was afraid
for all of us: those lovers on the bench
near Thomas Mangan, the park attendant chasing
children out of flowerbeds, that old woman
talking to her dog. A quiet day,

that day they shot your face away, Mairead,
in far Gibraltar -- Far from Thomas Kettle's
statue where I sat and watched you --
Well, young women just like you, Mairead,
who lay beside young men like those who lay
beside you when they shot your face away.

And when your skull was broken open, history
poured across the pavement, poured across
the lovers on their bench, the park attendant
and the children and the flowerbeds, poured
across the office-girls and boys, the grass,
the passing buses snatching sunlight from the leaves.

That day they did to you, Mairead, as you
had meant to do to them (the gun, the hit
or miss and run) I walked in Stephen's Green,
saw bodies spread out everywhere: the children,
office-girls and boys, and that old woman
lying in the shade beside her dog.

No aftermath of Ladysmith or Hartshill
this, where Irish died for Empire, names
inscribed inside the Fusiliers' Arch.
So quiet in Stephen's Green today the ear
might hear a gunshot miles away, the eye
see bodies stretched in dreadful massacre.

(In sad memory of all who were killed during the conflicts in Northern Ireland including Mairead Farrell and companions, shot dead in Gibraltar, March 1988)

III. Greysteel 1993

Courthouse steps, uniformed police, a young man in handcuffs shouting at news reporters…

My TV screen fills up with amputees
who sit dazed, wrapped in dirty sheets
on iron beds: It's civil-war-Angola,
mothers clutch their babies to their breasts,
their eyes like pearls, their blood coagulating
in their bandages, their legs abruptly

ending at the knee. My TV screen
fills up with silver discs and smiling men
in suits: It's EuroDublin, brand-new coins
are launched with hundreds of balloons and then
a story of a long-lost dog returned
and then the weatherman and so to bed.

We must be made in such a way our hearts
survive reminders only of a race
once roamed the Earth, a race that used to feel
the pain of others, traced another's tears
on their own faces, moved their hand to help -
not switch off, and yawn and check the doors.

And later on I wake, my cathode brain
still flickering his face - That fair-haired lout
who shot down seven in a bar-room
and I watch police and cameramen entangle
as he's dragged from court to van, shouting:
'Shoot the Fenian Bastards! Shoot them up!'

We must be made in such a way as not
to care too long lest we forget how
to forget: to chat, despair, condemn
all violence in the strongest terms, talk
of peace and reconciliation, wring
our hands before we wash and dry them.

In some backroom tonight the guns are bought
and sold while mothers squat with children sleeping
under plastic sheeting, waiting for the next
crazed mujadheen, next no-surrender
loyalist nut-case / republican freedom-fighter,
next American hi-tech clinical strike.

We must be made in such a way as makes
it easy to disown him in his cell
tonight, this fair-haired boy, this rapparee,
this Shelmalier, Top-Gun, this Samurai-
else how could we sleep tonight, complain
how TV violence does damage to the young?

I see you in your cell tonight, a bitter
cigarette between your narrowed lips,
a bitter thought a shroud around your mind:
'Shoot them up!' -- the suits, the chasubles,
the poets for peace, 'Shoot them up!'. Sit
quietly, mother's son, while plastic sheeting

rustles in the wind and children die -
your spite fermenting, blonde-haired warrior.
And better still if we could sit together:
you, so helpless in your hate, and I,
confused, no final credits waiting to conclude
this awful night that stretches out before us.

(In sad memory of those killed in the Graysteel Massacre. And of their killers)

^

Biography

Eamonn Lynskey is a teacher and Adult Education Director. His poetry has been widely published. His first collection ('Dispatches & Recollections') was issued by Lapwing Publications in 1998.