After the hours retracing
Bloody Sunday’s route with thirty thousand,
from the Creggan Height right down to the basin of the Foyle,
through all those ordinary, downtrodden, every-streets to Free Derry Corner.
After the warm embrace
of a cheerful revolutionary monk from Salerno
I get to chatting in some kind of pidgin
to an Iraqi man who has pedalled all the way here
from Paris on a rickshaw.
This a story I heard from a friend
who heard it from an Iraqi engineer
who fled away to Ireland
from bomb clouds and anthrax
in the rain and mile long queues for food
He rings home once a month
to speak to his dying mother
A tomboy
always climbin trees and walls
scrobbin apples
robbin nests
the likes that got herself into trouble
with the priests and the nuns and the guards
and the people who counted their apples