Afterlives by Derek Mahon
I wasn’t familiar with Derek Mahon until I came across this in The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry.
Afterlives
By Derek Mahon
for James Simmons
1
I wake in a dark flat
To the soft roar of the world.
Pigeons neck on the white
Roofs as I draw the curtains
And look out over London
Rain-fresh in the morning light.
This is our element, the bright
Reason on which we rely
For the long-term solutions.
The orators yap, and guns
Go off in a back street;
But the faith does not die
That in our time these things
Will amaze the literate children
In their non-sectarian schools
And the dark places be
Ablaze with love and poetry
When the power of good prevails.
What middle-class twits we are
To imagine for one second
That our privileged ideals
Are divine wisdom, and the dim
Forms that kneel at noon
In the city not ourselves.
2
I am going home by sea
For the first time in years.
Somebody thumbs a guitar
On the dark deck, while a gull
Dreams at the mast-head,
The moon-splashed waves exult.
At dawn the ship trembles, turns
In a wide arc to back
Shuddering up the grey lough
Past lightship and buoy,
Slipway and dry dock
Where a naked bulb burns;
And I step ashore in a fine rain
To a city so changed
By five years of war
I scarcely recognize
The places I grew up in,
The faces that try to explain.
But the hills are still the same
Grey-blue above Belfast.
Perhaps if I’d stayed behind
And lived it bomb by bomb
I might have grown up at last
And learnt what is meant by home.
A brilliant poem of great tonal subtlety and complexity of feeling. This partly derives from the way in which harsh and soft elements are intercut with and made to challenge each other. The harshness was extreme in the original version, with the offensive “cunts” in the place of the weak “twits” in the first line of the fourth stanza. It’s easy to see why Mahon felt unable to let that stand, though I’ve argued and still feel that the change weakens the poem.
Mahon’s two most recent books, Life on Earth and An Autumn Wind are presumably not represented in the Norton Anthology but they are immensely worth reading. He’s one of our best poets and his career is well worth following all through.