Marching Season
He had no truck with the Billy Boys, my dad.
When cameras cut to Drumcree
and the crowds on Garvaghy Road,
he would leave the room, ignoring
the brass band pomp and TV holler,
hectoring preachers and speech of fury.
He escaped at twenty, but was drawn back
at sixty-five. We went over, me and him.
I was given a new first name.
‘I might have to call you John,’
he said, as we called on distant kin.
Small talk disturbed a living room
in the shade of the shipyard.
Pleasantries strained, an old boy
waving his cane: ‘Is he Catholic, your son?’
My father would not be drawn
on his son’s Fenian name.
He didn’t give two figs for the Orange
or the Boyne. Let the bloodied hand
of Uí Néill glad-hand the parasites.
He had no time for the Twelfth
and left this world on the eleventh
as if to make a point, I’ve always thought,
to sneak the last word.
