Irish Pages LTD

Safe GroundAuthor(s): Gary AllenSource: Irish Pages, Vol. 3, No. 2, The Home Place (2006), pp. 66-67Published by: Irish Pages LTDStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30057417 .

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IRISH PAGES

Each within our universe of pain, we watch the line straggle to the little stone church -

the perversity of existence:

as the bus pulls out to the roadway, to what we believe is normality

and the fields roll on, the rain hammers the roof, the buildings become a mirage like the hospital buildings in front,

and my aunt wrote only once from there - Look onto me, for there is nothing else.

66

SAFE GROUND

My welcome home was a bearded sailor blue on a gable wall

the open window of the cobbler's shop an uncle gruff with religion

blistered fingertips stained with tannins a mouth of tacks like broken teeth

or marriage vows, illegitimate children

the oil lamp a bright star above a cradle

mundane, beautiful for all that

without sermon, ceremony, or Mass

the squat chapel in darkness, the great Celtic crosses a sleeping race

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IRISH PAGES

behind the Parochial Hall where the youths loitered with boxing gloves and hurley sticks for a quick fumble of a breast in the smoky air:

the first stone, thrown in anger a dead star from another universe

that states, all mine are false with the sin of Worms, with language -

and my uncle holds out salt and bread that is bitter with finite limits

yet binding with thirst and vengeance.

67

DUST

It is the moment all men fear, deny, the soul and body separating either watching abstract television alone, late, or some evening leaning absent-mindedly on the No Trespassing gate to the Memorial Gardens -

and the voice calls into the animal bewilderment,

perhaps for the last time, Come forth.

This man stopped his Transit van on a country road, door open, engine running, he raced across a field he had never seen before in aimless terror, and when he could run no longer he returned relieved, but with knowledge.

Or we students outside the Technical College finding it funny, in a curious way, the woman on the ledge of the Church of Ireland tower

screaming that she didn't want to die -

she jumped, anticipating death.

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