POETRY

Catching the last train on any Sunday night,

when I was a student, before The Troubles,

they would be there. I would notice them

in noisy farewells clustered near the bar:

the men, red faced, shouting companionably

with the drink, the women calming kids –

the cardboard suitcases, the carrier bags.

 

Changing at Crewe, there would be more of them

to join us for the early Irish Mail –

refreshment bars and ill-lit platforms full

of bothered, now silent travellers.

One night – the Mail, as usual, delayed –

an old man, in a black overcoat,

gripping a scuffed doctor’s bag, its clasp

tarnished, turned to me, saying, in a soft

Dublin accent, ‘British Railways ought to be

bombed!’, and chuckled at what he must have thought

was our shared history and a past gone.

 

With them, waiting on the platforms or jostling

for seats, I felt close, whether real or imagined,

to centuries of unremitted wrongs

held so fresh in memories that it must seem

only yesterday the Black and Tans patrolled,

just a week since the potatoes failed,

a month since Cromwell’s hard-faced soldiery

massacred the innocents at Drogheda.

 

Leaving the train a few stops after Crewe,

I would think of their now unbroken way,

through a slate-black countryside, to embark

for somewhere they knew was home – and envy them

such modest certainty.