SEWAGE

Sewage

It is the year of the tightening belt.

Blackboards whiten in twenty four lounges

as another drowned hour is chalked off.

Our prophets chew pencils at counters in rows

divining the cross channel flightpath of balls,

the steward's eye, the ways of a terrorized hare.

In the  Spar, by a fridgeful of chickens,

Vincent Bennett puckers in his backless dress

serving black-eyed mothers red wine and caviar

while  upstairs  from the booming glue store

a long dead Apache warrior

spools out of a cough bottle and dances

round a tattooed bachelor's starry head.

Who gives? Bono sings lower and closer to God

and the ould hymns have new lines.

Hail Mary queen of wages, 

grant work to these vulnerable hands

Deliver us from our appetites ,

and lead us not into a nation.

The grottos are quaking.

Thousands are squinting under floodlights and rain

for a second sight of the official waking dream.

Before the eyes of nurses, barmen, bus-drivers,

surgeons, assistant vice-principals and children

stone quivers like the living flesh.

In my parish we can die by any means but lightening.

In this much we are blessed, though when a storm breaks

still we are ordered underneath the school-desks.

So was it God or government that blew this CMS into  Clon

like deliverance, like a second, forgotten, apocryphal ark;

carrying the unicorn of work?

Rheumatic knees splintering on freezing tiles,

palms rubbed blank on magic beads.

Smoke signals to archangels, and friday  fasts, and barefoot hikes

and pathetic Novena's in  illegible type

between league tables and the TV ,

in the arse-wiping section of  the Southern Star

(incorporating the Skibbereen Eagle,

our regal bird who still keeps an eye on the Tsar}

or was it only the mewling, threats and promises

of an ascending, though marginal, TD?

Whatever. The company  took on to crack

the roads in half,  overturn the riverbed,

release to the Atlantic our accumalated filth.

A column of neighbours and friends

working  spades and picks and kango drills

dig themselves straight for the first time in years.

Neck deep in an age of shit they  hack their way

down through the tar and the  grit

partitioning all our memorable names,

Connolly Street and Pearse, Casement, Bog Road and Tawnies,

discovering, as they parch and sweat,

empty bottles from the pre-union brewery

that  kept the long dead from dying of boredom

till  the brewery was turned to a workhouse,

and then was allowed cave in on itself.

Flat on his back, tunneling through black  sludge,

my father's elbow is clamped  by a real rat.

In the  ensuing short bout the rat is vanquished and dies.

My father scatters backwards welly first

out onto the daylit street, screaming.

What does it all mean? The genuine miracle-

six months work stretched out into eighteen.

Certain stool bound crows and yellow warblers

call it knavery.  The rugby gang enter a float

in the Patrick's day parade waving scribbled placards

with the blue slogan 'Slow Moving Company.'

But after five years  training  for the zerothon

what my neighbours have perfected isn't  sloth

but how to be  wrong on time and outside law  

precisely, and not get caught. The science is in 

laying random pipes a fraction of a millimetre out,

so they must be dug and dug and laid again.

Do this repeatedly. Say nothing to no-one.

I see things too .

I see a storm surge blooming in deep dark caves

underneath the pipes. I see Tarmacadam crack

and foam, then burst.  Pearse Street swell like a sea.

The gutters, geysers. A brown torrent blasting up.

A small town drowning in its own waste

and mine own lovelies squealing, 

swept  into the ocean on the rebounding tide

of all  we thought  we'd  flushed away.

But that could never happen.

That'd be terrible altogether,

That would be a thundering disgrace.