A child's map of Dublin by Paula Meehan

I wanted to find you Connolly’ Starry Plough,

The flag I have lived under since birth or since

I first scanned nightskies and learned the nature of work.

“That hasn’t been on show in years,’ the porter told us.

They’re revising at the National Museum,

All hammers and drills and dust, converting to

An interpretive centre in the usual contemporary style.

The Natural History Museum: found poem

Of oriole, kingfisher, sparrowhawk, night jar,

But the gull drew me strongest – childhood guide

To the freedom and ecstasy of flight. Common

Caophonist, nothing romantic about that squabbler

Of windowledges, invader of the one p.m. schoolyard,

Wakefollower of sailors. But watch him on a clear ocean

And nothing reads the wind so well. In the updraught

Of a sudden love, I walk the northside streets

That whelped me; not a brick remains

Of the tenement I reached the age of reason in. Whole

Streets are remade, the cranes erect over Eurocrat schemes

Down the docks. There is nothing

To show you there, not a trace of a girl

In ankle socks and hand-me-downs, sulking

On a granite step when she can’t raise the price of a film,

Or a bus to the beach. The movie she ran in her head?

Africa – hostage slave to some Berber prince or, chainmailed,

She is heroine of a hopeless war

Spurring her men to death, but honorable death.

Better I take you up Cumberland Street Saturday.

We’ll hoke out something foreign and erotic,

From the mounds of cast-offs on the path.

And when the market’s over we’ll wander home,

Only go the streets that are our fancy.

You’ll ask me no questions. I’ll tell you no lies.

Climb in here between the sheets

In the last light of this April evening. We’ll trust

The charts of our bodies. They’ve brought us

Safe to each other, battle-scarred and frayed

At the folds, they’ll guide us to many wonders.

Come, let’s play in the backstreets and tidal flats

Till we fall of the edge of the known world,

And drown.

Paula Meehan

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