The Way of Them
For Adrian Rice and Alan Stuart Mearns
The man before us,
doing our looking,
is past currying favour;
he has taken leave of his lodge
for a moment alone.
A follower of the Lambeg,
he is dead-beat after pounding
the roads of Ulster for Queen and country,
and now, hat-on-knee,
we catch him in repose, taking in
all that has taken it out of him
but drives him still.
This Orangeman’s demeanour is a wee bit off
as they usually wear order like a badge of honour.
We’re used to seeing them in sunlight,
rigged-out, bowler hat to hobnail,
upright and uptight, defiant and proud,
and flanked on both sides by stern brethren.
Still, our man is a picture, composed,
sitting there like Billy-No-Mates,
out of the frame
but about to be pulled into one,
all the same.
*****
Once members of the Civil Rights Movement,
my folks weren’t blind
to improvements long overdue.
The way it was, or the way things were,
would only serve to get you so far,
yet tolerance was no stranger
in the house anomaly built;
my parents made choices.
Both were blow-ins, springing from
border-town and townland
but settling in Downpatrick,
and I wasn’t let forget it.
As a young cub in Brookeborough, Fermanagh,
a Protestant neighbour,
and not for bad manners,
would put my four-year-old da up on his knee
and run him through chapter and verse
of ‘The Sash My Father Wore’.
It wasn’t long before George Kirkpatrick
would have him singing it,
like Lord Carson’s cat1
regaling visitors, and him only four,
the Taig next door,
with inhibitions no more.
Not your average rite-of-passage
for a Northern Catholic, or so we’re told;
an experience as fond and profound as it is old.
With our ones, there’s a sectarian foot-fetish –
an obsession with having to know
which foot one kicks with.
Once, after a show in Hickory, North Carolina,
the poet, Adrian Rice, approached me and said:
Back in the day, we didn’t know what your da was.
To which I replied: I don’t think he knows himself!
*****
As I re-tread old ground of my own,
dotting the lines through milestones,
I forever arrive at each and every how and why:
Holidaying at Granny Hanvey’s,
I was often exposed
to names I’d never heard tell of before,
not because my ears had been intentionally closed,
it was just that names such as Armstrong
sounded very composed,
and from the likes of Cartwright and Atwell,
I recall, right well, a welcoming warmth
from what I could tell.
Robert Atwell lived on Main Street there
and always put me in mind of the orchard-chair
he’d lend us to raid apples across from his house.
He had nothing but the time of day for my bounce
whenever I rapped his dure,
and my giddy elation when out he’d r...