Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 35

A firefighter tries to extinguish a fire amid rubble just after a suicide car bomb exploded in Baghdad, Iraq, Monday, March 5, 2007. A suicide car bomber struck near the well-known Mutanabi book market in central Baghdad Monday, killing at least 26 people and injuring more than 50, in a first major blast in the city in several days, police said.

(AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed)

Love Affair with Firearms

by Medbh McGuckian

From behind the moon boys' graves

bleed endlessly; from photograph

to browning photograph they blacken

headlines, stranded outside of time

at the story's frigid edge.

Though they are long buried

in French soil, we are still speaking

of trenches, of who rose, who fell,

who merely hung on. The morning drills

secretly, like an element that absorbs.

We are right back where we were

before the world turned over,

the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone

are all that Sunday means. Their North

was not 'The North that never was'.

Artemis, protector of virgins, shovels up

fresh pain with the newly-wed

long-stemmed roses, pressing two worlds

like a wedding kiss upon another Margaret:

lip-Irish and an old family ring.

It's like asking for grey

when that colour is not recognised,

or changes colour from friend to friend.

I track the muse through subwoods, curse

the roads, but cannot write the kiss.