The Omagh Bombing and a Birthday
The afternoon was like any other somnolent Saturday
mid-August: marketing to be done, gossip
swapped, bets placed each way; a new season
about to kick-off, a special day
anticipated like the morning’s frying bacon,
evening’s hoped-for assignation.
Les Miserables was halfway through the matinee
at home, United were one down
and I was half-asleep. Someone was kissing
you somewhere, this was your day,
your twenty-ninth year, my third without you,
Lucy’s Day: sunny, white and blue.
The only decision for me to make
was what to cook and eat to remain awake
until time legitimised the hour when I might sleep.
I drank hot tea in the dark and listened,
smoked by the open window, batting flies away.
Hadn’t they warned us on Good Friday?
The day was followed by another. I reconnected
the phone - no one had called to tell their troubles..
The radio counted the dead: twenty-eight,
one for each of the years which had taken her
to twenty-nine, and put me twenty ahead.
I read Auden’s lament for Yeats
and, drowning between sleep and awake,
believed my mother was still alive.
I woke not knowing where I was, dazed,
wanting touch, my hair wet. And I thought
how the days flash by without a sound,
and how like coffins the years go down.
Page(s) 26
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