Poetry Peter Adair

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: PETER ADAIR

Peter Adair’s poems have appeared in The Honest Ulsterman, PN Review, Poetry Ireland Review, The Bangor Literary Journal, Boyne Berries and other journals. He has a poem in Eyewear’s The Best New British and Irish Poets 2019-2021. An epamphlet Calling Card is available from Rancid Idol Productions. He lives in Bangor, Co Down.

Easel

They sip mugs of tea and munch scones fresh from the oven, then drift to the craft room, sit at benches nailing picture frames together, hammering wardrobes almost into shape; sawdust, drips of paint, their sacrament, when, through golden light, a dove hovers a moment over a homeless prophet, that epileptic haloed like a saint.

Peter Adair

Memorial – a found poem

In Z1 Public Plot, Belfast City Cemetery, 7,863 babies –stillborn or soon dead –interred 1943-1996.

I’m lucky. I know where my baby is buried in a copse.

Each tree has a number, in between are graves; each grave hides several babies.

When it rains it’s waterlogged. A smell of rotting leaves.

Belfast City Council said: The soil in Z1 is a heavy red clay and the heavy rainfall this year did cause difficulties.

Proposed design: a 150cm headstone engraved with a baby lying on a bed of leaves.

Some mothers are still searching.

Peter Adair

Beachhead

Hard not to admire their conquest of earth, the yellow outposts

that colonise the rocks on Ballywalter beach.

Like the Romans and British they’ve built an empire

to last. But when we’ve fled to some distant planet,

and laid down sewage pipes, and poisoned rivers,

a few dogs might miss us but not the imperious lichen.

Peter Adair

Leftovers

Once the leftovers from the feast were stored away in the fridge for a lunchtime fry next day. I stirred the lumpy sizzle of turkey, potatoes and sprouts. Waste not, want not, mother said.

But what’s left now? What hot storage awaits me so late in the day? The singalong incineration of bone, brain and gut. Waste not, want not, mother said.

Peter Adair

Homecoming

I

For many a year I have rooted about until, at last, I am: I have found my roots, sunk them deep down in my native soil.

Returning to the farm where I was born, I grip my brother’s earthed hand: ‘Sure,’ he says ‘it’s like you’ve never been away.’

We sweat in the fields and scythe the hay or herd the cows along the dungy lanes. I lower a bucket into the deep well of being.

When he chats in rapid Irish, I turn green, prod him gently into an English field where stone by stone we raise a cairn to the dead,

then sniff the spoor to school and chapel, the children’s museum: pump, anvil, creel. I have become my own exhibition.

II

Back home in the cottage, yonder in Ballinaloob, I warm my soul at the hearth as the last speaker of our Doric greets me: ‘Fare fae ye, ye halion!’

Puffing his auld cutty, he pokes me in the ribs: ‘Do ye recall thon day ye ate your first raw eel?’ I choke again at that quaint rite of passage.

Then, misty-eyed, he recites the first words I scrawled in the hamely tongue, holds up the notebook` where, aged ten, I rhymed ‘clachan’ with ‘smackan’.

As he spalters off home, he spits on the floor: ‘Why did ye quit your wee bit hoose for thon toun

and caitiff English?’ I fluff my Jacobean lines.

Peter Adair Cont

III

At home in field or cot, I roughen my soft words, unlearn my deracinated poetry –too highfalutin for my folk to heed.

And, driving home – well, to my home from home –I hear the locals mulling over my return, all sage nods and not one malicious word:

‘He hasn’t changed at all. His head never swelled. He’s the same wain who kicked a ball in the yard. You’d never know, would you, he’s a famous man.’

I pity the rootless, pity those restless ones never settled long enough to have a home. Yes, I have found my roots. I have come home.

Peter Adair