Derek Mahon:

Glengormley

‘Wonders are many and none is more wonderful than man’

Who has tamed the terrier, trimmed the hedge

And grasped the principle of the watering can.

Clothes pegs litter the window ledge

And the long ships lie in clover. Washing lines

Shake out white linen over the chalk thanes.

Now we are safe from monsters, and the giants

Who tore up sods twelve miles by six

And hurled them out to sea to become islands

Can worry us no more. The sticks

And stones that once broke bones will not now harm

A generation of such sense and charm.

Only words hurt us now. No saint or hero,

Landing at night from the conspiring seas,

Brings dangerous tokens to the new era—

Their sad names linger in the histories.

The unreconciled, in their metaphysical pain,

Dangle from lampposts in the dawn rain;

And much dies with them. I should rather praise

A worldly time under this worldly sky—

The terrier-taming, garden-watering days

Those heroes pictured as they struggled through

The quick noose of their finite being. By

Necessity, if not choice, I live here too.