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Diversion, and: The Weather, and: The Reconstruction
- Éire-Ireland
- Irish-American Cultural Institute
- Volume 40:3&4, Fómhar/Geimhreadh / Fall/Winter 2005
- pp. 265-266
- 10.1353/eir.2005.0025
- Article
- Additional Information
Éire-Ireland 40.3&4 (2005) 265-266
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Diversion, and: The Weather, and: The Reconstruction
John McAuliffe
Diversion
I noticed it day one and then forgot
The redbrick viaductTill the council boys
In the luminous hardhats and vestsRaised scaffolds that cast shadows
Straight and preciseAs a map of the colonies
Across the footpath and the green marginWhere they've stacked the new sleepers
And earthed the transformer.
The Weather
Is coming down around them and filling up the fields
But they are Sunday drivers, stuck in a dead end, with their heads
Buried all the while in table-sized road maps that approximate
To where they live, in what we'll call the Hall of the Present Life,
Its walls loud and impermeable as radio and its roof screwed shut
So they rarely notice the emissaries of the Hall of the Western Paradise
Who dwell among them at crossroads, in courtyards and country lanes,
Who take many guises, whose form is fluid and inconstant,
Who will receive the souls of the dying believers,
Who on their vests wear the names of those who paid for their creation,
Who carry in one hand a rope for binding, and in the other a knife for killing. [End Page 265]
The Reconstruction
In caved the ceiling's once-white plaster so the room was taller
As well as wider but what was hidden by the plasterWere four wasps' nests, two broken so the combs
Showed layered like a cross section of skin with black flumesShot through; the others were streaked brown and grey eggs
From which they now curled out like smoke or flagsUnfurling even as the young man, the hired help, froze,
Claw hammer in hand, facing something, in the dust, that settled and rose.