Rolling Dice

At the foot of the cross we gambled, and argued over trivia and the wine was sour, the wine bit like vinegar

this one from the West had been in the sun too long his skin would kill him

he relished the men he had murdered stripping them to their underwear throwing their bloody and dying bodies over the wall at Casement Park

and my mother sat out Good Friday waiting for my father to come home as the world darkened as his lorry abandoned on the border smouldered among concertinaed bales of hay

he appeared in the doorway later that Sunday morning so drunk he could hardly stand a bottle of Guinness in his dust- coat pocket a carrier bag of flattened Easter eggs for the kids:

fear becomes anger as rib cages shatter under their own weight as limbs twist away from sinew

the skinheads on passing trains slashed at each other from the open windows like the sunlight flicker of an old black and white film

the long walk on a broad city thoroughfare in shadowed silence before the first of the bombs threw all the office furniture into the street

the young officer in the patrol car who hadn’t time to reach for his pistol and cried for his mother

as ants pick at a horse’s jaw bone as my father snores in his favourite armchair like a circling helicopter at a funeral as Judas spills his seed in the potter’s field.