Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

“Sure you don’t want to worry about
little tings like dat!” you said.

We were halfway around Ireland
with you driving from Dublin to Cork

before you told me you didn’t have
a driving license and had never passed a test.

“Sure you don’t want to worry about
little tings like dat!” So I didn’t.

We were looking for the goodness of Guinness
to drink it all over the South
or as much of it as we could manage
to praise the goodness of its maker.

So we drank it down to soothe
our consciences between the Irish coffee
breakfasts, the gin and tonic lunches

and the wine and brandy dinners.

*

“Look at those bastards!” you’d say
in every hotel dining room, pointing out

the priests, their dog-collars softened
by discreet lighting and their faces warmed

by the glow from their balloon glasses.
“Bastards!” you’d say as we lived it up
from Killarney’s lakes to Galway Bay

on the fat of the land and our Guinness a day
singing the songs of the IRA
to twanging strings and a tin whistle.

*

In that October every tourist trap was sprung
and low cloud rested on the green fields
and grey dry-stone walls. We were drunk

in the backs of barber shops and greengrocers
or sometimes in the parlours of isolated cottages,
joining in the one conversation which murmured

its low masculine note into the darkness,
or waited in the Holy Hour for the black stout
to slow to a dribble of poetry.

“Sure you don’t want to worry about
tings like dat!” you said
as we watched Nelson’s statue explode

at the top of O’Connell Street,
and you gave me a piece of its speckled granite
to use as a souvenir paperweight.

*

It was a good fortnight we had illegally on the road
in the days of the Behans and Edna O’Brien
when it was easy to whoop the rebel cry
and romanticise the freedom fighters

as, wearing the green and waving
a flaming sword, you stepped out

of your London urbanity into a fantasy
of young men whispering on dark corners