Trying to Preserve Brian Moore's House
Clifton Street, Belfast 1998

All that remained of your childhood home

was to be smothered under the asphalt of a parking lot.

There wasn’t much left beneath the blanket of litter,

save the chequered mosaic of your kitchen floor -

                      a miserable tribute.

You left Northern Ireland for North America

and now I, addicted to your fiction,

bend low and the crumbling fist-sized pieces

of your kitchen floor come to me easily.

Useful paperweights, I think. Literary history.

But the helicopters, steady as hummingbirds,

hang over the broken lot, watching.

I hear a waking bullet click -

and, still stooped, look to each corner

of your childhood garden. Nervous soldiers raise

their guns, the squawk of a radio,

my breathless chest in their crosshairs.

Time photographs itself.

In slow motion, I pocket

your house and with surrendered hands

step away from the present.

I push through the defiant graffiti of

je maintiendrai tiocfaidh ár lá

and bring your past home, to America .

A paperweight now, it guards your novels

and remembers how you once scooted

over its polished surface - testing your rootless legs -

waiting for that moment when you would walk away.