promo picMichael  J. Whelan is a poet and historian living in Tallaght, CountyDublin. He served as a peacekeeper with the Irish Army in South Lebanon and Kosovo. He was 2nd Place Winner of the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award in 2011 (short listed 2012) and selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series in 2012. He was 3rd place winner in the Jonathan Swift Creative Writers Award (poetry) 2012. His poems and short stories have been published in Cyphers, Crannog and The Moth.

 

GRAPES OF WRATH*

It happens on a Thursday, just after 2pm,
when ancient cultures and beliefs conspire
and vultures spiral above a peacekeepers’ camp,
where cedars age slowly and the Litani River
caresses the ground where Jesus turned water
into wine, where artillery salvos rip the air
on their long flight and bite deep, deep into
that place of safety vaporizing its concrete
walls and burning and blistering and tearing
apart the mass of terrified flesh and innocent blood
seeking refuge from the hate of man.

A soldier climbs from the rubble limbs
and discarded faces, his eyes caked black with tears,
his hands at arm’s length clutching the newborn baby
that looks like a headless doll.

______________________________

*(Qana Massacre April 18th 1996).During ‘Operation Grapes of Wrath’. Israeli Defence Force artillery shells strike a Fijian UN compound in South. Lebanon protecting 800 civilians fleeing the fighting, approx 120 died.

 

THE RAIN HAS COME

The war is long over but it is not ended.
The searchers have come again
to dig but they must wait,
for today will be made of sorrow and pain.

The rain is falling, contaminated by gunpowder and
the residue of long decayed firebombed trees
rolling down into ditches and the gullies of dried up riverbeds,
where the wind might sometimes lift the ghosts of the dead
into whispering dust devils to live and die once more
within the span of moments.

The rain has come
to wash away the footprints of killers
and the hopes of the hurting,
who still long for the missing,
their hearts hinged on a rusting bullet casing
exposed like a white bone on the deepening red mud.

 

ECHOES

There is nothing left in this village
but the burnt out shells of homes,
roofless rooms and echoes
drifting across scorched black grass,
following boot prints through alleyways
and well trodden streets,
over rank smelling chicken coups,
dead pigs and silent tractors
stuck in time and sodden earth,
past the ancient cemetery and schoolhouse
to a raised ditch on the side of an infamous hill,
where the only living things without guilt
are the swarming swollen flies
feasting on the end story of a thousand years.

The echoes are not of children’s laughter!