I'm writing just after an encounter

With an English journalist in search of 'views

On the Irish thing'.

I'm back in winter quarters where bad news is no longer news,

Where media-men and stringers sniff and point,

Where zoom lenses, recorders and coiled leads

Litter the hotels. The times are out of joint

But I incline as much to rosary beads

As to the jottings and analyses

Of politicians and newspapermen

Who've scribbled down the long campaign from gas

And protest to gelignite and sten,

Who proved upon their pulses 'escalate',

'Backlash' and 'crack down', 'the provisional wing',

'Polarization' and 'long-standing hate'?

Yet I live here, I live here too, I sing,

Expertly civil tongued with civil neighbours

On the high wires of first wireless reports,

Sucking the fake taste, the stony flavours

Of those sanctioned, old, elaborate retorts:

'Oh, it's disgraceful, surely, I agree,'

'Where's it going to end?' 'It's getting worse.' '

They're murderers.' 'Internment, understandably. .

The 'voice of sanity' is getting hoarse.

II

Men die at hand. In blasted street and home

The gelignite's a common sound effect:

As the man said when Celtic won, 'The Pope of Rome's

a happy man this night.' His flock suspect

 In their deepest heart of hearts the heretic

Has come at last to heel and to the stake.

We tremble near the flames but want no truck

With the actual firing. We're on the make

As ever. Long sucking the hind tit

Cold as a witch's and as hard to swallow

Still leaves us fork-tongued on the border bit:

The liberal papist note sounds hollow

When amplified and mixed in with the bangs

That shake all hearts and windows day and night.

(It's tempting here to rhyme on 'labour pangs'

And diagnose a rebirth in our plight

But that would be to ignore other symptoms.

Last night you didn't need a stethoscope

To hear the eructation of Orange drums

Allergic equally to Pearse and Pope.)

On all sides 'little platoons' are mustering-

The phrase is Cruise O'Brien's via that great

Backlash, Burke-while I sit here with a pestering

Drouth for words at once both gaff and bait

To lure the tribal shoals to epigram

And order. I believe any of us

Could draw the line through bigotry and sham

Given the right line, aere perennius.

III

'Religion's never mentioned here,' of course.

'You know them by their eyes,' and hold your tongue.

'One side's as bad as the other,' never worse.

Christ, it's near time that some small leak was sprung

In the great dykes the Dutchman made

To dam the dangerous tide that followed Seamus.

Yet for all this art and sedentary trade

I am incapable. The famous

Northern reticence, the tight gag of place

And times: yes, yes. Of the 'wee six' I sing

Where to be saved you only must save face

And whatever you say, you say nothing.

Smoke-signals are loud-mouthed compared with us:

Manoeuvrings to find out name and school,

Subtle discrimination by addresses

With hardly an exception to the rule

That Norman, Ken and Sidney signalled Prod

And Seamus (call me Sean) was sure-fire Pape.

O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,

Of open minds as open as a trap,

Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie wicks,

Where half of us, as in a wooden horse

Were cabin'd and confined like wily Greeks,

Besieged within the siege, whispering morse.

IV

This morning from a dewy motorway

I saw the new camp for the internees:

A bomb had left a crater of fresh clay

In the roadside, and over in the trees

Machine-gun posts defined a real stockade.

There was that white mist you get on a low ground

And it was deja -vu, some film made

Of Stalag 17, a bad dream with no sound.

Is there a life before death? That's chalked up

In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain,

Coherent miseries, a bit and sup,

We hug our little destiny again.