Photo by Laura M. Slatkin, 2016 Paris
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Belfast
Your velvet hills came to me
last night at the pool
as they embraced the bustling city
the pubs filled and buzzed
which Europa has now been unbombed for years.
Their political murals are kitschy
and history is a ditch
to lie if we let it
the gravediggers
call us. let’s bury
our pseudonyms
all unreleased.
Was Scarlett O’Hara’s father
a blustering man from Ulster
or was he a farmer
like Grandpa from Wicklow
tender and tender amidst the turmoil
and kind to his slaves
but for the obvious?
White people are weird
with their vitamin D
and sun damaged skin.
So far from an equator
It’s hard to walk the line
in a divided world.
Orange, green, navy blue
The colors are weapons
as well as some horses
in the 19th century.
Freed from machines
see them race
on brittle ankles—
Beauty a late bloom
of non-use. your shop windows
were climbed, your university
Victorian, the linen district
deceased. The solid brick
that protects us undisturbed
smashed a window.
Your sky hung low your beer
rode up your visiting Freemasons
sober and punctual.
A Days Inn here
is a Days Inn everywhere
but for the protesters who gather
the gaud of their bands at odds
with their sunken, gaunt faces
closed like a handbag
at an old clock
that keeps the time
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Maureen N. McLane is a poet, memoirist, critic and educator. She has published seven volumes of poetry, including This Blue, a National Book Award finalist. She is also the author of an experimental mix of memoir and criticism (My Poets), two monographs on British Romantic poetics, and numerous essays on romantic and contemporary literature and culture. Her poems have been translated into Italian, French, Greek, Spanish and Czech. Her most recent book is More Anon: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021); her next book What You Want: Poesies will be published by FSG in spring 2023. She is the Henry James Professor of English and American Literature at New York University. [“Belfast” is from This Blue, FSG 2014]
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Mural from Belfast
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