mary ellen1Mary Ellen Fean lives in Shannon, Co. Clare. Her work has appeared in The SHOp, Revival, The Clare Champion, and she was shortlisted for The Desmond O’Grady Poetry Award 2012. She has read her work widely.

 

 

CHE

Imagine if you had gone north that time
In Sixty-seven, not west to Kilkee
The Movement of July 27
might have begun
in Derry or Belfast instead of Cuba;
if you’d stayed, invoked the Irish
grandmother rule, sought asylum
El Commandante’s revolution would have been ours.

It’s a good time for a return,
now we’ve run
out of heroes, sold out patriots
traded them for star-makers.
We’re selling everything,
the highest bidder your old
adversary;
America has found a chink in our
Too-green soul –
So welcome home,
Ernesto,
They won’t murder you a second time.

 

THE GERMAN SEASON

There were four of us that last dry
summer, we’d swop the Saturday night
disco for a six-pack of beer and go
down to the marina. The height of the
holiday, the German season.

Lying in the spikey grass, popping
beer bottles, not much talk at first.
boats lapping the water,
shiny snouts dovetailed, names like
The Offaly Star, The Mullingar Rose –
moored to our Côte d’Azur.

we eared their conversations
spied on them in their pale T-shirts,
inhaled their cigarette smoke
their rowdy laughter and grew careless,
raining pebbles against the
starboard side like buckshot;
we watched them scurry below,
voices fearful –
In those moments, a dark thrill of power.

 

SYRIA

The dead children are wrapped
in white cloths, laid together
like new loaves. Burial is swift.

In the old city, goats ramble through its
empty heart, and a burnt out tank is the
newest toy. The queue for bread
lengthens, and the talk is despair.

In the crumbling streets,
young men swear vengeance,
they are ready to die, they say.
gunfire powders the old walls,
Snipers fill every silent crack.
In the snake pit in Damascus,
there is stalemate:
for the survivors,
there is winter.