Wreaths

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Wreaths

The Civil Servant
He was preparing an Ulster fry for breakfast
When someone walked into the kitchen and shot him:
A bullet entered his mouth and pierced his skull,
The books he had read, the music he could play.

He lay in his dressing gown and pyjamas
While they dusted the dresser for fingerprints
And then shuffled backwards across the garden
With notebooks, cameras and measuring tapes.

They rolled him up like a red carpet and left
Only a bullet hole in the cutlery drawer:
Later his widow took a hammer and chisel
And removed the black keys from his piano.

The Greengrocer
He ran a good shop, and he died
Serving even the death-dealers
Who found him busy as usual
Behind the counter, organised
With holly wreaths for Christmas,
Fir trees on the pavement outside.

Astrologers or three wise men
Who may shortly be setting out
For a small house up the Shankill
Or the Falls, should pause on their way
To buy gifts at Jim Gibson's shop,
Dates and chestnuts and tangerines.

The Linen Workers
Christ's teeth ascended with him into heaven:
Through a cavity in one of his molars
The wind whistles: he is fastened for ever
By his exposed canines to a wintry sky.

I am blinded by the blaze of that smile
And by the memory of my father's false teeth
Brimming in their tumbler: they wore bubbles
And, outside of his body, a deadly grin.

When they massacred the ten linen workers
There fell on the road beside them spectacles,
Wallets, small change, and a set of dentures:
Blood, food particles, the bread, the wine.

Before I can bury my father once again
I must polish the spectacles, balance them
Upon his nose, fill his pockets with money
And into his dead mouth slip the set of teeth.

Poetry

Michael Longley said:

I have written a few inadequate elegies out of my bewilderment and despair. I offer them as wreaths. That is all.

Elegies brim with the remembered liveliness of the dead. Elegies are a celebration as well as a lamentation.

I wrote a lament for our local greengrocer who was murdered by the Ulster Volunteeer Force...You have got to bring your personal sorrow to the public utterance. Otherwise you are in deadly danger of regarding the agony of others as raw material for your art, and your art as a solace for them in their suffering. Atrocities of the mind.

It was a friend of mine who was murdered by paramilitaries and I didn't want to identify him, so I gave him the title 'The Civil Servant.'

…when somebody walks into a home where there is a smell of cooking and where BBC Radio is playing music and takes out a gun…. they are offending the gods really… They are desecrating civilisation. They are disrupting far more than they probably thought about.

Though the poet's first duty must be to his imagination, he has other obligations - and not just as a citizen. He would be inhuman if he did not respond to tragic events in his own community, and a poor artist if he did not seek to endorse that response imaginatively... In the context of political violence the deployment of words at their most precise and suggestive remains one of the few antidotes to death-dealing dishonesty.

Clarifying the Poem

• Unlike Wounds, Longley is here more interested in the victims rather than the perpetrators of violence. He is more concerned with the consequences - personally and socially - of the murders than with the actual murders themselves. His description of these murders is downbeat, unemotional and, consequently, more shocking.

• Longley gives the poem greater universality by referring to the occupations rather than the names of the murdered victims. This also emphasises the ordinary and productive nature of their lives.

• The domestic imagery used in all three poems reflects the common humanity of the victims: books, dressing gown, pyjamas, Ulster fry, cutlery drawer, holly wreaths, fir trees on the pavement, false teeth, spectacles, small change. The accuracy of the incidental details - that bullet hole in the cutlery drawer, the bubbles in the tumbler, the widow's powerful grief-stricken attack on the piano - gives the poem its power and resonance.

• Although each poem uses a different formal and linguistic structure, none of them use rhyme. Its absence makes the incidents related more chilling and more horrifying.

• There is no tone of condemnation. By rooting his poetry in the incidental details, he allows the reader to respond without nudging him or her to any particular political or moral conclusion.

• Using his father in the last poem is one way of identifying with the sense of grief the poems are attempting to convey.

• The use of religious references in the second and third poems gives a wider dimension to the feelings evoked.

Comparing Poems

• As in Wounds, this poem describes the political violence which devestated Northern Ireland during the troubles.

• The identification of a father's feelings and the brutality of war-like violence is also evident in Ceasefire.

• The undercurrents of such violence also lurk behind the poem Poteen.

For more information on comparing poems, go to the Comparative Themes page.

Questions on the Poem

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© All poems remain the copyright of Michael Longley

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