Just the other day
I met a girl
and she smiled
at me, and I thought
of my dead sister
and those
circumstances
in Inchigeelagh
fifteen years ago.
It was nobody's
fault, they said,
yet I know
it was a carefully
planned murder.
I was fifteen
and away at school
called home
for the funeral.
My mother, distraught,
and my useless
Father, fondling
his unlit pipe and
dithering, stroking
his moustache.
They were country
police, Gardai Siochana,
embarrassed
touching their caps.
"So sorry for your
trouble", they said,
the wellworn formula
for local tragedy
so often seen
so often suffered
in the cottages
on these green and misty hills:
farm accidents
tubercular children
the drunken exchange of blows
outside the village pub
resulting in death.
Her death, I knew,
was no accident.
But what could I say?
Time followed
the rains dropped down
and my mother
went into a decline
while my father
drank whiskey
fingered his moustache
and lost money.
God rot them
I thought, in England,
and later in Japan
trying to set aside
the inevitable
tribal requirement.
I knew him
and he knew I knew.
