Mother Tongue, and: Bog Man, and: Hallowe'en

Mother Tongue

Apprenticed at four to a dark witch with strange words,who moved figures on a board,speaking a tongue to which my ancestors were born.I see it in the buses, government forms.Mother tongue a native son that can caress you no more.Guttural urge, pagan root, you hang out with the eliteor landsmen who learned you at the hearthnot in school, figures on a board.Can a government save what a government destroyed,or grants revive what time has eaten away?

Mother tongue in a tourist shop dolled up on a saint's day,branded as mine.My tongue does not taste you when I sleep,an English whore fills my dreams with her speech.When I talk you do not crease my lips.Mother tongue, what language does my heart speak?It's been too long we've lost you to Empire.Thirteen school years spoon fed your sound,to be left with so few words and such a dry toast:"Sláinte."

Bog Man

When they found him his skin was peat brown—tanned like leather—his manicured nails never knew hard labour,taken in battle, standing at the back like a Greek King,rousing his men, taunting the enemy.He comes from the North where fresher corpses lie:victims of guerrilla war.Lab reports say his two-thousand-year-old body matches a typefound on the High Street.

Bog water preserved him like vinegar. He was healthy,had eaten well before a dagger probed his gut,axe cracked his skull like a muffled drum.The hazel wands through his biceps may have been post mortem:holding him under on the boundary of a kingdomon whose flag a bloody hand waves from a white field,an offering to Crom, their god, who walks abroad stillhis laughing black eyes calling for sacrifice, atrocity.

Hallowe'en

An absence of fires—no one knocking at the door at first dark—no masked children, hands stacked, asking for sweets,a fruit offering: "Help the Hallowe'en party?"As kids we had thrown sulphurous firecrackersor pulled door knockers with twenty feet of thread,stood round massive fires fuelled with wood, old sofas, tyres;stuff we'd gathered and hid for weeks like ants—an unnamed urge driving us.

I remember the hysteria when someone saw ghostsin the dancing flame's shadowy blaze.Here they have different gods, the streets are quiet.I sit in a foreign land with kids of my ownwho tell me they don't notice the lossof apples bobbing in water or coins in a basin,and I forget too that youthful lust that drove meout into the arse cold nightwith a bag filled with goodies,a plastic mask from the Corner Shop.