[ɪ] [ai] [æ] [ei] [ʌ/ʊ] [e/eə:] [i:] [ɒ] [əʊ] [ɑː] [uː] [ɜː] [au]

I was parked on a high road, listening

to peewits and wind blowing round the car

when something came to life in the driving mirror,

someone walking fast in an overcoat
and boots, bareheaded, big, determined

in his sure haste along the crown of the road

so that I felt myself the challenged one.
The car door slammed. I was suddenly out
face to face with an aggravated man

raving on about nights spent listening for
gun butts to come cracking on the door,
yeomen on the rampage, and his neighbour

among them, hammering home the shape of things.
'Round about here you overtook the women,'

I said, as the thing came clear. 'Your Lough Derg Pilgrim

haunts me every time I cross this mountain -
as if I am being followed, or following.

I'm on my road there now to do the station.'

'O holy Jesus Christ, does nothing change?'
His head jerked sharply side to side and up
like a diver surfacing,

then with a look that said, who is this cub
anyhow, he took cognizance again

of where he was: the road, the mountain top,

and the air, softened by a shower of rain,
worked on his anger visibly until:

'It is a road you travel on your own.

I who learned to read in the reek of flax

and smelled hanged bodies rotting on their gibbets
and saw their looped slime gleaming from the sacks -

hard-mouthed Ribbonmen and Orange bigots
made me into the old fork-tongued turncoat
who mucked the byre of their politics.

If times were hard, I could be hard too.

I made the traitor in me sink the knife.
And maybe there's a lesson there for you,

whoever you are, wherever you come out of,

for though there's something natural in your smile
there's something in it strikes me as defensive.'

'I have no mettle for the angry role,'
I said. 'I come from County Derry,
born in earshot of an Hibernian hall

where a band of Ribbonmen played hymns to Mary.
By then the brotherhood was a frail procession
staggering home drunk on Patrick's Day

in collarettes and sashes fringed with green.

Obedient strains like theirs tuned me first
and not that harp of unforgiving iron

the Fenians strung. A lot of what you wrote

I heard and did: this Lough Derg station,
flax-pullings, dances, summer crossroads chat

and the shaky local voice of education.
All that. And always, Orange drums.

And neighbours on the roads at night with guns.'

'I know, I know, I know, I know,' he said,

'but you have to try to make sense of what comes.
Remember everything and keep your head.'

'The alders in the hedge,' I said, 'mushrooms,
dark-clumped grass where cows or horses dunged,
the cluck when pith-lined chestnut shells split open

in your hand, the melt of shells corrupting,

old jampots in a drain clogged up with mud -'

But now Carleton was interrupting:

'All this is like a trout kept in a spring
or maggots sown in wounds -
another life that cleans our element.

We are earthworms of the earth, and all that
has gone through us is what will be our trace.'
He turned on his heel when he was saying this

and headed up the road at the same hard pace.