Driving Home From Derry, Feb 3rd  2002.

For Catherine

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 speeches, the clapping,

the marching bands, the mourning,

the silence, the wind in the flags;

after the names were joined—

Derry, Palestine, Afghanistan—

time came for five to hurry back

before the frozen road would stay us for the night.

Out we drove towards Aughnacloy

past the union colours painted on the kerbstones,

past ‘FUCK THE BRITS’ and ‘UP THE UDA’,

past the watchtowers and the listening posts,

past election snipers and billboard hunger strikers,

on over a sudden blizzard’s leftover slush and ice,

on and on towards the invisible line,

on towards the republic of signs.

When “See that there” said Brid, the driver,

to Zack from Gaza, jabbing through the windscreen

at the Greco-Roman night.

“See that there, that’s Orion.

See the three bright stars across, that’s his belt

and see the two small ones down on the left,

that’s his sword and see

his big head and shoulders, see them?”

“Aha” said Zack behind her — half-asleep

and dreaming perhaps of diving as a child

into the starlit Nile to catch a fish between bare hands

or of the Gaza stars his father fished beneath

and of the stars his father’s father saw before him.

And in the back seat our heads lolled at the frost-glittering stars,

seeking out Hercules, Cassiopeia , Perseus, Andromeda…

And in the back seat I got to dreaming

about how when the war is  over,

when the curse of blood and soil is done,

we’ll both lie naked and brave under a starlit sky

stretched on the fine sand

of a phosphor-shimmering bay

somewhere out there in the wide world,

and how one by one, we’ll tear the gods down off the sky

and hang new names for the constellations, you and I.