Nostalgia

With the last drop of juice in the batteries
Came the voice: a septuagenarian president
Declaring war. Then our radio went dead.

We could not figure, in this pasture where
We'd pitched camp for a summer week,
If there was substance in the air
Of mild amusement in his voice.
Was he around the twist?

We cut sticks for a fire and sat around it,
Two of us warming our cold hands and faces.
Smoke rose. Fire crackled. Sticks spit resin.

Would they land while we were sleeping:
Protection-suited government officials,
Armoured knights of some new feudal age?

We did not sleep that night.
Come the dawn, we reckoned:
Out here we are safe, but for how long?

That slow, fine, powdered wind from Washington,
Bombed to smithereens; that dust migrating
South towards our bivouac, would get us,
Even if we heard no missile roar,
Or saw no dissipating vapour trails,
Horsepower of the Apocalypse.

You suggested that we pack what food we had,
Strike camp and take the car.
'In any case, we're goners,
So we might as well go out among our own.'

The landscape seemed unblemished, country
Lanes unspoiled by bodies of dead
Sheep and cattle, dead civilians, horses.
We were bearing up. As building after out-
Building went by, we wondered if a neutron bomb
Had been deployed, no dead outdoors.

It was only in a town that we found out:
The war had not occurred. The former
Actor had been improvising. Testing
Out a microphone, he'd joked about the one thing that
We'd kill him for, should we be, come the moment, close enough.

Drought

Dead cat, fuming with a smell
Of firestorm-lacquered fur:
An APC with melting tyres
Ran it over in the road.

Entering the shelter now,
I find a plague of flies
Attracted by the odour of my room.

Wandering, they hammer at a pane,
Having entered through a crack
Small enough to foil
Any other burglar.

I open all the windows.
House flies gather in a cloud
That drips into the air outside.

Clothing does not touch my skin
But floats around a lens of sweat
Through which my body's magnified.
I wash away the heat, becoming small.

The sweat returns, too sticky. You
Can almost drink the air. I think:

Those flies out there, those traumatised,
That road-kill cat, those corpses in the
Newly-penetrated street —
Dead kids, fuming with a smell

(1995, revised 2003)

^

Biography

Patrick Chapman lives in Dublin, Ireland. His collections of poetry are Jazztown (Raven, 1991), The New Pornography (Salmon, 1996) and Touchpaper Star (Lapwing, 2004). His short story, A Ghost, won first prize in the story category of the 2003 Cinescape Genre Literary Competition. He has been a finalist twice in the Hennessy Literary Awards and once in the Ian St James Awards. He adapted his own short story for film, Burning The Bed (2003), which stars Gina McKee and Aidan Gillen and is a prizewinner at the 2004 Worldfest in Houston, Texas.