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Thunder Sandwich #23 |
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Nigel McLoughlin |
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Names You turned up again, In another man's story. He called you slapper, He called you whore, He called you 'Juliet'. Yet I recognised you From your missing trigger Finger, left years ago on A Belfast barricade Like an apology. He filled in your history The pregnancy, the whoring, The suspicion of HIV. How, life was severed from you Numb-quick as amputation. All this narrated, third person. But I knew you before all that, When you were beautiful, And I called you by An older, closer name. After The Battle Night cursed its way along the valley, Lay like a malartán in the cradle of two hills. The moon like a burst of ore had shot through the streams' seep between the stones and sifted ferric flakes downhill from the battlefield where the weapons rust their way to their oblivion of soil and shattered bone. Even the grass is vaguely ferrous, the sharp blade hides that underhand green, flicks it from the frosty underside like a switchblade of colour. Dew shod, I make my crossing across a treachery of stones my feet defy by gripping before the crack split the blue air wide open and through it something vast and dark at the corner of my eye approaches, flutters, passes. Again and I look down into the whiskey- coloured water a long while before I realize the ore that colours it. I drop my gun - a splash - a crack off stone, I feel the iron heat half-cauterise my side. Who'd have thought that blood could have been that colour. |