Cycle
Go dtagfadh do ríocht
Surrounded; inundated traffic of best ofs and resolutions. What they preach in fiction: show don’t tell. The tyres of a year. Does it do any good or harm to compare? They’ll do it to themselves, to others. The days of a child. A hand in the cereal packet, a plastic toy. Cartoons characters. Not knowing what’s for dinner.
Following the diaspora I started another school as an seven year old expat. There had been many before, many to come. On return from Ireland for Easter, Summer and Christmas loaded with six packs of Taytos and Kimberley. Starting a habit. My home country: , the Oxen of the Sun hospital, the priest who baptised me, my godparents gone somewhere by car, as the first grandchild given and shown a very Catholic love. The church was somewhere close, God was air and water, even in your head and Jesus he’d died for our sins, he hung from a cross, nailed and bleeding in the rooms of school and my grandparents but not in my bungalow. Tir na nOg. From the cul de sac I couldn’t see the supermarket my mother worked , there was grass and trees, I believed in lions being there, ghosts from science fiction crossover movies, and from the dock in town: America. Burgers, toys and Indiana Jones. The Goonies. Slimer. Luke Skywalker. Spiderman and the Hulk. Hollywood was treasure island. Was America the land of a supermarket of superheroes?
Our own myths had been choked , swallowed and almost forgotten from a history forever threatened by being replaced by the colonisers. The cowboys, the killers, dressed in hunting gear, dressed undercover, army fatigues. Its hard work ruining another countries children. Beating the breath, twisting the tongues, fucking and raping what they took as theirs. For the decade Margaret worked relentless, staying awake for hours to bring misery. If only the time bomb had gone off when she was sitting on the shitter or biting into buttered toast and the Grand Hotel had crumbled into the sand, billions of biscuit crumbs, tea bags and her eyes floating , then sinking into the sea that separated me from the life that would have been mine. The rich priests, the kiddy fiddlers tore holes in families with their ban on contraceptives, their dumb decision on birth before marriage and had women taking boats alone to the very country that had been fucking them for over eight hundred years. What happened to them? What did the sperm donor do but follow and go to the shebeen to drop a punt, drop another, drink up, drink it down, get to the time they close, slumber through another week of work and after work, then the weekend pub where the more you drink the more of a man you become and the more money you have and sure there’s another mot, pay for the devils drink but those pockets get stitched up when she needs a ferry.
The homecoming for us children of half, half here and there, marks cut in half, tormented by nuns speaking the queens English asking us to en un c iate clearly. Schools run by catholics. On the streets, roads, cinema, swimming pool we forgot about Jesus. In the sweetshop or staying in a caravan in Portrush. Sitting in Powerscourt with a bowl of chowder or toasting bread on a stick in the cold country. Driving through rain, driving away from the airport. There in the first five seconds of waking it was a new year, real life was a tromluí.*
They sang on the radio about being true, phone calls, about smiles. They didn’t sing in the language they taught the prayers in. The prayers were different there, repeated at school each day at church, words as exercise, as exorcism. In England they changed to words, like they had changed everything, each night in pyjamas with the light out I struggled to remember Sé do bheatha, A Mhuire so I said to God my words.
*nightmare