…Emptied is the golden barrel the sun became a rag with a middle-aged woman’s neck whose cough never ends; she grieves for the end of summer with its gold on her shoulders and on her mound. Oh woman who lost your light hear, the blind man sings. It got dark, close the windows; make flutes from yesterday’s canes, and don’t open no matter how they knock; they shout but have nothing to say. Take cyclamens, pine needles, lilies from the sand, sea-anemones; oh woman who lost your mind listen, the water’s ghost goes by… ‘Athens. Events occur rapidly, the people have heard. The minister declared. There is no time left…’ ‘…take cyclamens…pine needles… lilies from the sand…pine needles… oh woman…’ “It is definitely stronger. The war…”
“I bet none of your sons’ll be fishermen,” Sweeney argued. “You can’t make a decent living at it any more. The whole industry’s gone mad.” He reached out and poured the formerly rejected half bottle of porter into a glass. “What did it cost to run a boat before the war? A hundred pounds a week maybe. Now it costs around three, four hundred. Even more for the big boats. You’re paying out more than you’re taking in.” “I’m not.” “Then you’re an exception, Joe; and I wish I knew how you did it.” Sweeney was staring at the pale, frothy head in his glass of porter. Then he looked up at Joe. “It must be galling for you to get tuppence or thruppence a pound for your fish at the quayside and watch the fishmongers in their shops rake in anything from sixpence to half a crown.” “And there’s damned little going for sixpence, I can tell you,” said Slattery. “In fact the housewives in the city are complaining because they can’t get enough fish, and the fishermen are complaining because they can’t get rid of it. I hear that whitings were so plentiful during Lent that fishermen couldn’t give them away. They had to send them to the manure yard. I think Michael was wise to sell out. Not that he’s a fisherman anyway.” “Speak of the Devil and he appears,” said Sweeney. “How are you, Michael? Come and join us.” Michael and Caitlin had just appeared at the dining-room door and looked in. “We’re going pretty soon,” said Joe Carney. “Don’t give us that impatient look.” “They’re not very hospitable, are they, Joe?” Sweeney teased with a leer. “Wouldn’t you much rather be surrounded with good friends, lots of food and plenty to drink on a miserable, wet night like this than stuck in here all alone with nothing to do and no one to talk to?” “I would to be sure, Sweeney,” Joe agreed. “Come on, you two, sit down, have another drink, enjoy the craic.” “I think we should take the hint and go,” said Seamus Slattery. “It’s getting to be very late. This isn’t one of Finn’s parties.” “You don’t have to leave on our account,” said Caitlin. “Oh, I think we do,” Slattery declared. “It’s been a long and memorable day for you two lovebirds.” “Well, your wife’s still gossiping in the kitchen,” said Sweeney. “Go and grab hold of her and tell her it’s time to go home. Come on, we’ll all go together.” Twenty minutes later the house was empty, and Michael and Caitlin sat…
III Our years were spent amid the bullets of friends, enemies, revolutions and wars bullets of official and unofficial forces killing bullets aimed at the back, neck, piles of dead people and others and others. You see them scattered amid the old metal pieces, silent bullets, cold, rusted you don’t realize that with such material we built our houses, that each wall, because of the bullets was our prison, our exile, our underground life. Yet sometimes we pushed the wall down, we defeated the enemy we were again victorious, then we found ourselves surrounded by other, bigger walls, while the populace always followed, and following they shed their blood.
Delphi Even this solemn remnant of the ancient temple standing like an anchorite in meditation on the slope of the tired hill even this they will defile remember it — I said half-breed men with wide shoulder-blades and hierodules with exquisite cheekbones swaying their provocative buttocks for the amusement of the winds and for the salinity of the smooth sea even this they will defile remember it—I said aimlessly before the innocent statues they will desecrate and life a whore they will call and with stamina and unyielding persistence they will bury the primeval beauty and after they exhume the ancestral hatred and guilt, they will imprison pneuma to be guarded by Herculean arms and theirs the wealth of the valley and my kin’s reward blood-shed in streets and neighborhoods where you and I once roamed and played making plans for exploits and deeds and you said — it would have been better if we stayed obedient to the holy and venerable half-truths brought to our lands by easterners at least they promised a gleaming Paradise
