OLDE ARDOYNE
The family boarded a plane in London
It taxied on a Belfast runway 1967.
In a taxi going through the hills of Antrim
My mother’s southern view of Ireland
Quaint cottages, livestock and freedom
as if we were cycling through romantic Ireland.
the car fell from the hills through Ligoniel
along the Crumlin Road and turned left into Ardoyne.
My fathers bastard world the one he saw waking up
as an infant in a basket by a blood red door.
I woke in a Dickensian world with girls in ropes
swinging around lampposts and boys playing
football in the street.
My dad said there’s your school it stood lonely like a
prison
surrounded by a spiked fence and a dirty red brick wall
with three layers of rusted barbed wire.
We stayed at my aunt Sarah’s
a mill worker with three fingers missing,
drab mousy hair who always wore an apron
and knelt scrubbing the front step as if waiting for god
or some haloed man to drift into her terraced house.
I slept on a mattress on a lino floor
looking up at a sacred heart picture
scratching away fleas and listening
to banshees in the back alley.
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