Carrickfergus

I was born in Belfast between the mountain and the gantries To the hooting of lost sirens and the clang of trams: Thence to Smoky Carrick in County Antrim Where the bottle-neck harbour collects the mud which jams The little boats beneath the Norman castle, The pier shining with lumps of crystal salt; The Scotch Quarter was a line of residential houses But the Irish Quarter was a slum for the blind and halt. The brook ran yellow from the factory stinking of chlorine, The yarn-milled called its funeral cry at noon; Our lights looked over the Lough to the lights of Bangor Under the peacock aura of a drowning moon. The Norman walled this town against the country To stop his ears to the yelping of his slave And built a church in the form of a cross but denoting The List of Christ on the cross, in the angle of the nave. I was the rector's son, born to the Anglican order, Banned for ever from the candles of the Irish poor; The Chichesters knelt in marble at the end of a transept With ruffs about their necks, their portion sure. The war came and a huge camp of soldiers Grew from the ground in sight of our house with long Dummies hanging from gibbets for bayonet practice And the sentry's challenge echoing all day long. I went to school in Dorset, the world of parents Contracted into a puppet world of sons Far from the mill girls, the smell of porter, the salt mines And the soldiers with their guns.