Children

Children in ill-fitting uniforms
drive adults to school, and children
argue the cost of tobacco
in the Newsagents nearby.

You must have noticed them.

And in the mornings they rise to slaughter pigs,
cook breakfast, solve crosswords at the office...
Or they send tiny adults into minefields,
barefoot, with pictures
of Khomeini around their necks,
their old toes searching the sand
for death.

And children queue for Bingo
on Ormond Quay, on Mary Street,
and douse their leaking take-aways with vinegar.

And children talk and smoke incessantly
in Eastern Health Board waiting rooms,
always moving one seat to the right,
someones parents squabbling over trinkets
on the worn linoleum.

And it is always children
who will swear for their tobacco -- children
with beards and varicose veins --
and children, dressed as policemen,
who pull their first corpses from the river.

And who is it who makes love in the dark
or in the light, who haunts
and who does all our dying for us,
if not children?

We leave their fingerprints
on everything we touch.

1
Our mothers bled, and bleed,
and our enemies,
and our enemies mothers.

2
It rushes to the finest
nick, romances the blade.

3
It dreams
the primary dream of liquids:
to sleep, horizontally.

4
It is in the surgeon's heart,
the executioner's brain.

5
Vampires and journalists
are excited by it; poets
faint on sight.

6
I knew it better as a child,
kept scabs, like labybirds, in jars.

7
Blood: now mine would be with yours
until the moon breaks orbit
and the nights run cold.

In the dream-land of a child
I met a man who would never die,
to whom could be given precious things.

But the map was lost, or the child was wrong.
The eternal man was never found.
Hard wind is the only wind that sings.

I leave my gifts in this snow for you
where I lose myself, trying to be true,
following footprints -- probably my own.