Excerpts from "Light", a long poem written in Belfast, N. Ireland, in Winter 1994

A Catholic man was shot by the UFF last night

in a house on Candahar Street, four blocks from mine.

It was noted as the first sectarian killing of the year.

As I settled deeper under my duvet, half-reading, half-asleep,

someone, I speculate, was drumming his fingers on a dashboard

and jiggling a gun against his knee. As I turned off the big light,

the sledgehammer must have hit the door, a woman screamed,

feet thudded upstairs and down again. I fell asleep before the sirens began,

and dreamed of the fire barn a block away from my childhood home.

My brothers and I learned to decode the combination of long and short

horn blasts

that signified the different types of fires for the neighborhood volunteers,

who would roar up the street towards the station in response,

and we each developed uncanny and annoying siren shrieks

that we would unleash on each other when too excited to sleep.

The wailing, once proved groundless, would provoke my harried mother

to tears.

The first night the girls heard me typing, they thought it was gunshots,

but were too knackered to leave bed and investigate.

Certainly this borrowed British typewriter that squats on my table is no gun.

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I first noticed the difference between Hiberno - and American-English

in the way people pronounced the word "now."

Here, I hear everything from "nigh" to "nahr" to "nowr,"

but never the "now" I know. And it is more important,

an imperative heaved lovingly into every command.

The Irish for "now" is "anois,"

whose licorice flavored seeds are used in cordials,

or "a niche," meaning a space or welcomed recess.

Forgive my sin of understanding one language

through its unmeant echoes in another.

Look at it this way: the "one" in "one language"

can be heard as "won," which is "now" spelled backwards

and is the state of a gift given freely and recieved by chance.

©1997, Bridget Meeds