After the Congo, and: Heatwave, and: Móin na nGé

After the Congo

They brought him home by ship—Matadi to Antwerp—all those latitudes,casket draped in the tricolour, and blueun flag, then the City of Waterford to Cork

and Dublin. Two officers accompaniedhis coffin. On the long funeral processionpassers-by knelt on the wet pavementsfrom Arbour Hill to Glasnevin.

He was given a hero's welome,laid to rest with full military attention.They brought him home from the equator,buried him in an Irish winter;

after river, ocean, shifts in temperature,at the grave, his wife and son, weeping.

Heatwave

Lots more fish, her mother said.She could see only the one,

down past the tennis courts in summerstriding along the river,

books in his hand,looking straight ahead,

bushman's hat,great black coat trailing him.

When he turned to her in Junetheir tongues pressed

innocent and hard against teeth,then soft and lingering.

The blue of a dress on the grass,the heat of her skin.

Beside them, pale leavesof the weeping willow hung

in the water and speckled troutin the current swam upstream.

Móin na nGé*

The signpost in Irish made sensemy mother's pronunciation,all those years of Monagea,in my mind's eye, one eveningat Camas just saying good-bye,a gaggle of slow geese,

bustling across the road-fieldto the pond by the gatein a straggling line, imperious,serene, ladies in white flounced lacein late summer heat ambling to a ball,ready at the least inspection

to take umbrage, lift wingsand flap, rush long snake-like necksacross the stand at us and hiss,flightless birds, poisedfor ambush or take off,glean fate in advance—

nothing to do with a golden egg,more—precious goose fat,strongest quills paredfor a pen, downy feathersplucked for a quilt, beside the range,that sinewy span, a goose-wing.