[ A ghost of Yeats stumbles between ]

A ghost of Yeats stumbles between
crumbling tenements, swearing like Behan
towards the fading Georgian memory
of colonialism: Bloomsday
without any flowering,
seeds awaiting
an undisclosed
indisposed season.

Walking through the mists, dawn
arriving on the echoes of trams, tramps
in the doorways, sleeping
or dead
paint the darker image.

Poor owld Anna Liffey, the blood
flowing wave of effluence,
a wound of song, of romance -
sixteen dead men buying mussels
to warm the cockles
of each exiled heart.

I remember us, locked in Glasnevin,
climbing into the dusk,
appearing under glimmering streetlights
as twilight fell
upon a Celtic caricature.

We paused, Dublin and I, listened
to the pristine tunes suck
the air from the tourists, vampires
upon fiddle and bones, no
place for the changing this.

Across the water the twentieth century,
here the church.
Across the brave Atlantic, Amerikay
called in faded sepia
imaginings a whisper of spuds
and JFK.

Lately, upon a brief return, I found
coffee chains in Castlebar,
a mosque up in Rathmines
and the echoes of Europe, renewed,
in fragments of conversation
upon the fresh air
of a new century.