There Was Fire in Magherafelt

          For Sinéad Morrissey
 
There was fire in Magherafelt,
and twenty-two years afterward we bent our steps up Church Street to watch it.
Lit up, fractured and dust-shrouded all the shops near the Diamond it did, that bomb.
Brought the Ulsterbus depot in Broad Street down hard on one knee.
 
We remarked upon the quiet, orderly bustle of the town –
all history placated, or perhaps not, by the clean lines of a new concrete structure –
and we wondered: Will it help sustain a peaceable calm within Magherafelt
through its new tenants, the Escape Beauty Retreat and Compassion Ministries office?
 
There were no surviving signs, no pitting of nearby concrete even (we looked);
no memorials nor misspelled spray-can epitaphs: Toicfaidh ár lá!
But, uneasy, we felt we could glimpse embers through the darkening veil of history
and as we did the second of Seamus’s “Two Lorries” idled menacingly in our heads.
 

P.W. Bridgman

in the collection A Lamb, 2018, Ekstasis Editions,
ISBN 978-1-77171-273-6

 
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Fox Fur Draped Over Mrs. Avery’s Shoulder

Surging inexorably inward,
parishioners in heavy woollen coats
rump through the open doors like bison,
leaving the crippling Manitoba cold behind.
Almost lost in the stumpy forest of their legs,
I cling tightly to my mother’s hand.
It’s 1958.
 
The organ churns.
Coffee smells bubble up from the basement below,
mingling with a clamour of other scents:
perfumes, tobacco, mothballs, wood smoke.
 
And this is God’s house?
 
The fox fur draped over Mrs. Avery’s shoulder: its head
      menacing, yet benign; sinister, yet impotent.
Its black eyes alive to this world, but its mouth
      congealed, powerless, pathetic.
 
The fox fur staring down from Mrs. Avery’s shoulder:
      the devil’s stalking horse for sure,
or maybe not.
 

P.W. Bridgman

published in The Idler (www.idler.ie), April 2020

 
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Brexit Music

     (After Louis MacNeice’s “Bagpipe Music”)
 
It’s no go the cavernous yawns, it’s no go sermons in Chinglish.
All we want is a Sunday jaunt to a bar where the maids aren’t Polish.
Young Vicar Ng’s lost half the flock; his wife’s gone over to Rome.
After 17 hours of confessing (the cow!), the Catholics sent her back home.
 
Bridie MacGowan – the widow of Nolan – has lately been feeling the tingles.
That Maltese man with the Vauxhall van’s been bringing her roses and Pringles.
Could it be love from heaven above’s got Bridie so woozy and squirmy?
More likely than not it’s herpes she’s caught. The man with the van’s got shingles.
 
It’s no go national debt, it’s no go climbing inflation,
All we want is a flag to wave and an end to immigration.
 
“Measure for measure, we’re all better off,” says carpenter Sid to Peter.
“There’s something ethereal about the imperial (but I’d trade them my pint for their litre).”
It’s no go revolting cheeses, it’s no go veal blanquette.
All I want, for the love of Jesus, are a Ploughman’s and Vogue cigarette.
 
Iskander Jameel and his lovely wife Lil were returning to London from Durban.
They were held for a day at Heathrow they say. Something to do with his turban.
“We’re English, you know,” they told Passport Control. “Our parents were born in Stevenage.”
The officer (skeptical) applied cream (antiseptical) to his hands after searching their baggage.
 
It’s no go to Strasbourg courts, it’s no go Brussels handouts.
All we want for our restaurants is a tariff on underpriced sprouts.
 
Mr. McAvity went for a stroll in the Edgware, past ghutras and hookahs.
“This isn’t my England,” he thought to himself, a-tremble with fears of bazookas.
Hurrying back, he bumped into Kala, the nurse who had cared for his daughter.
He couldn’t quite see why this girl from Fiji should be different, yet somehow she ought to.
 
It’s no go tax increases, it’s no go NHS cuts.
All we want is a government powered by ether, phlogiston and nuts.
 
It’s no go the caravan holidays, simplified crossings at Dover.
It’s no go the wines from Bordeaux, packed tight in the boot of the Rover.
It’s no go the cheery “Allo!” when arriving at Plage de la Baule.
All we seek is to stay for a week every year ’till we’re sick of Blackpool.
 
It’s no go to liberal myths, it’s no go ethnicity.
Wide-open doors bring civil wars and economic adversity.
The pound’s been falling hour by hour, the pound will fall forever.
Who can afford to keep sipping Chambord? Oh well. Chin up. Whatever.
 

P.W. Bridgman

published in Culture Matters (www.culturematters.org.uk), March 2020

 
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You Have a Visitor, Sir

Looking up from The Whitsun Weddings, my attention drawn to the foot of the purple curtain
by a whisper of movement, I rub my eyes and strain to see.
The hem of a dress? Faded, vaguely patterned, edged with lace, its colour uncertain.
Surely just a garment left behind by a guest of this hotel before me,
ruffled by a breeze from the open window? Surely. The fire is dying in the grate.
I am weary of Larkin’s whingeing. It is unaccountably late.
I close my book, swallow down the lees of my gin and lemon and make to stand.
But now the curtain presses gently inward: in relief, it begins to show a female form.
Rekindled, fearful thoughts start to swarm.
I stay motionless, rooted to the floor. The glass falls from my hand.
 
A woman’s buttoned boot, her boot, is now visible beneath the lace,
its leather toe facing me, shining in the flickering firelight.
Then comes the unmistakable click of metal splints. Her leg-brace.
The brace that unctuous Mr. Bottle retrieved, blackened, from the crematorium – using sleight-
of-hand that only conjurers and undertakers practise – after taking an anxious call
from my father-in-law (her son Jim). A sentimental man, that Jim. He also took home the pall
from her casket (“a lovely royal purple”) to cover Lickspittle’s birdcage.
Lickspittle, her watchful, omniscient African Grey – given to the occasional, profane rage –
learned all its lethal oaths from her, you see. She could out-curse them all.
 
“Annie? Annie! I thought you’d left us,” I say to the curtain in a papery, tremulous voice.
“Nine years ago, last Wednesday,” I add, gingerly, waiting for something, anything.
Nothing. I drift back in memory to her wake. “We’re not here to mourn, but rejoice,”
Jim’s brother had remarked. “No, Jackie,” said Jim. “No. You mustn’t. It’s a time for forgiving.”
I am startled out of brief reverie by the wheezing of silk against the curtain’s chintz.
The black boot moves again. And again, comes the quiet click of metal splints.
That sound. It flashes anew to hold and discomfit. My spine stiffens with dread.
Then a gust from the open window, the high window, lifts the curtain away.
For a moment I see it, and hear it – the African Grey:
“I’ve told them what I know,” the parrot says in Annie’s voice. With that, I fall dead.
 

P.W. Bridgman

published in The High Window (www.thehighwindowpress.com), Winter 2019

 
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