Placenames and commemmoration

I meet the men at compass points of a millenarian life,

not old men in snugs, foam on querulous moustache –

they’d all be dead. Each takes his place

where I too find myself, half by accident.

Pearse in Cullenswood, a wash of children surging in the corridors

of a Gaelscoil I took part in founding, his railroad logic laying steel,

Connolly in a chair (as at the end) in Pilot Street, child on his knee,

my father-in-law as would become, talking up a strike to hard men in caps

Casement in Murlough on a boulder over Moyle, good boots well worn, his mind on Belgium’s Congo and the Amazon, diamonds and shackles

Ledwidge bends his back on the bridge at Slane, breaks stone and rhythm, subverts Yeats but listens to a noble call, enlists for little Belgium,

Plunkett walks to Magheraroarty, his stride pounds out a ballad

on the foot and mouth disease, t.b. be damned, wry romantic to the end,

McDonagh drafts some prose on prosody in U.C. D., not bettered since,

Kettle takes up position in the Green, starshell clears his brain, his sight.

Ends and means, decisions and sacrifice and mere accident

swirl in deep eddies in the estuary of time, in camouflage pattern.

They took no more, no less

than they were willing to hand out,

fashions in uniforms change, the men are worth the knowing,

and what they did. Each place remains.