Beal Na mBlath 1999

for Maurice Manning

I went to the place where they shot Michael Collins

seventy seven years after the event

to the day

it was raining

The country was bright and sun-filled

all the way from Dublin down

in a contrast stark

Bandon was full of edge at noon and dark

and here it was on a black cast-iron road sign

Sean Hales Street

shuttered terraces and dark doors

God only knows

why this rain still pours

Out the road that Collins took his final day

it rains and rains quite heavily

it must have been pouring and raining and pouring

these seventy seven years without a stop

stuff of pipers grim and local office holders

a stream there now and lush the vegetation

and afterwards a middle-of-the-road oration

and one old soldier

Half-hooded ones respectful and funereal

their bawneen wives and ford cortinas parked

darkly shouldering each other in the downpour

and a grand-niece many times removed

says her platitudes and gratitudes

on behalf of the family

corking as it were

this gloomy cider

The myth of Irish Civil War

of Dev and Collins and of more

the way we wrote our history

and they who wrote our history

could not story-tell as well they might

and tell of Carson and of Londonderry

Churchill Birkenhead of Moya and of Hazel Lavery

how the matter as one author said

was settled back in eighteen ninety eight instead

and as Carson diaried sweetly

followers of Collins and the Dane Coll conveniently

at each other’s throats

God only knows

what dynamic and deception of the self

what cocktail of emotion and stupidity

of heartfelt love of country and rigidity

what strained conscience

which path in the common good was taken

and by whom

and who the judge

God only knows

What is it in the Irish heart

or missing

that’s so selective when it comes to look upon its face

what Francis Hackett called an allergy to truth and facts

could it be the soul whose child is guilt

the Irish people or at least the nation that they built

its own foundations filled by a million corpses

wretched and starved at first

by a property-owning native stock

This act of passive treachery

Was acted out again this century

I have a video at home

Wherein some fifty thousand natives dispossessed

In shirts of opel-green with their innocent eyes

Filled the Yankee Stadium

Whereas no other European state

Could field supporters at more than just the tourist rate

Recent Irish history more easy and complete

up Adultery Avenue and around by Parnell’s Street

at the Municipal Gallery where Yeats later visits

all his images around

Hazel’s Irish collection records therein

the spirit and the spirits of the time he found

(all in the basement now alas)

as though some ballad singer had sung it all

If history is important

it is important not to lie

nor to lazily leave the page unturned

allowing truth to die