Our road was low-lying. There were hollows
where some mornings in the autumns
you would drive into a patch strayed
into our path, refusing to disperse.
One moment motion and then nothingness
against the glass. Totality of white.
Inside our childhood summer sometimes
the sky is blue. Sometimes men are standing
at the graveside, and their faces are in hiding.
They are firing armalites aimed at the sky.
We flayed the corpses for the hides
my mother pegged out on the line
though the great skins no longer billow
over grass in the spring afternoon
but as I lug the bag of turf
back from the barn along the path
sway terribly out of winter dark
against my hand, beseeching.
Nick Laird's sixth book of poems, Beast Mode, is forthcoming with Faber. He is the Seamus Heaney Professor of Poetry at Queen's University Belfast
where some mornings in the autumns
you would drive into a patch strayed
into our path, refusing to disperse.
One moment motion and then nothingness
against the glass. Totality of white.
Inside our childhood summer sometimes
the sky is blue. Sometimes men are standing
at the graveside, and their faces are in hiding.
They are firing armalites aimed at the sky.
We flayed the corpses for the hides
my mother pegged out on the line
though the great skins no longer billow
over grass in the spring afternoon
but as I lug the bag of turf
back from the barn along the path
sway terribly out of winter dark
against my hand, beseeching.
Nick Laird's sixth book of poems, Beast Mode, is forthcoming with Faber. He is the Seamus Heaney Professor of Poetry at Queen's University Belfast
