Paul Breen

THE MAIDEN'S CITY - A poem about Derry City

With love decayed, they came by chance upon
The city walls where once they walked together;
Remembering the long siege of their shared past.
Cannons, facing out across the double bastion,
Stood littered and abandoned above
the gates of Guildhall Square.

It's as if neither tribe knew
How to speak of this thing that connected them;
Or house its tempered fire inside the glass cases
Of museums; given over to sharing of stories.

She has her songs of Ireland’s twelve apostles, and
Thirteen men from one of sixteen Bloody Sundays
That shamed the world, when people of this
Oak Grove gave their lives for the sake of civil rights.

He knows, though turns his head away,
preferring stories of tailors and goldsmiths who
Built this town out of bogland when only myths existed,
Or garrisons and defenders of the gates:
Apprentice boys holding out against the
Gaelic foe, of which she’s one, the enemy
he spent a summer sleeping with when
she was golden-young and her face
Aflame with freckles falling in a shower
Of autumn leaves down to the broad bough
Of her shoulders whip-lashed in suffering.

But they’re older, and the freckles faded
Now those dark decades have passed.
Her brothers bombed a bar, then fled across
A bleak and lunar border, where his couldn’t catch them
In their long getaway that led to this,
A peace of sorts where they can meet and talk again,
And scrub the cannons down, clean up the square,
Agreeing to not disagree, as if all that’s gone between them
Becomes nothing More than a series of pillows laid out
On the double beds of their past, turning their backs
Away, whispering nothing of the nights before.

Perhaps, with time, they’d see laughter lines
Reflected in the cannons’ shine, and sense
The age within these gates they closed on
One another long ago; sealing old wounds
As they pace the walls, like Lundy,
wondering if they should turn the key, on time,
and walk, with slow unnerving pace
Back to days before they betrayed themselves.

ANOTHER POEM FROM THE PAST I CAME ACROSS THIS MORNING.

The Addiction of You

How sweet you looked asleep, like
Janis Joplin’s voice before heroin –
Which you are, in this grainy movie.

Here, we’re addicted to IDD;
(instruction deficit disorder)
where we promise endlessly
to stop this yearning & pining
and consider the grieving of
others, though still our own
hearts take precedence and
they drive us towards liaisons
in coffee shops and libraries
and sooner or later beds
left unmade in hotel rooms,
as always happens in films.

Do you have a favourite actress,
one who might play the part of
Simone de Beauvoir in the films
you think of in the night, that
nobody’s ever going to make
because they prefer fairy stories,
and maybe I do too, watching
you asleep, hungry to reach in,
touch your head, make the sign
of the cross, like a priest, as if
superstition can make everything
ok.

Life’s tough chicken, you said,
but you’d do anything to have
me write for you, as your
name’s like a syringe of
tattoo ink mixed through
with heroin, or some other
brown dust picked up from
a Rolling Stones song.

So are we two then, us, too,
to gather no moss, despite
our addiction for which
there’s no easy cure?

Perhaps we go to an alley
somewhere at the back of
Fifth Avenue, behind all the
shops, on the edge of the park,
where we shoot each other up
with more tattoos, until we can
see colours forming on our skin
becoming luminous in the dark,
taking us back to the time when
i whispered things you couldn’t
hear because you were asleep.

I called you by your name and
placed the pronoun my before it,
as if so high on hallucinogens we
were far away and somewhere else,
sipping coffees, looking out on the
sidewalks, contemplating sending
postcards to those we’d left behind,
as if for a few sweet moments it’s ok
to hurt everyone else because we’re
losing ourselves in the addiction of
something poets might call love.

But we don’t talk of that; instead
we sip coffee even as it burns our
mouths and lips, knowing there’s no
reaching across and kissing because
that’s a fresh prick of a needle we
want to blunt, subsume, and bury
in the corners of the park where
there’s never going to be a next time.

Even though you were asleep, I called
you mine, and added an adjective too,
little, as if you were so small I could
put you in a glass vial, shake you up
with a series of colours, place this
syringe inside, suck you slowly up,
and then press down on the tip,
injecting you into me, so you’re
a tattoo of colours and hormones
and insulin, staying there for the
rest of my life, giving me synergy
and inspiration from the minute
I get out of bed, step inside the
shower and see water running
down your name written in a
blue heart between my nipples.

Or I could make you so small
you’d fit inside my pocket or
live under my pillow so that I
could hear your voice first and
last in the circle of every day.

But life’s tough chicken, you
Say, it’s not like the movies.
We have to shiver, and suffer
this addiction out of ourselves
for the sake of the others who
could spend their whole lives
never noticing the needle marks
if we keep coming back to this
space in the park, like a couple
of extras trying to transcend
fairy stories, and script a film
that makes sense only to us.