The Black Proclamation

The gates of DG Warings house were rusted. The driveway overgrown. I turned a bend in the
driveway and the house was on a slight elevation in front of me. The great empty windows
overlooked Carlingford Lough. The house was partially burned in a repisal attack in 1952.
Blackened on the northern side where the flames took hold. To the right of the house there was a
row of graves. The graves were small. Children I thought at first. The earth on several looked freshturned, black with some malice I did not understand. When I looked at the headstones I saw that
they were the graves of dogs.
Above my head the rooks sang the Black Proclamation.
My brother bought me a box of lead figurines of the rising leaders. The figures rest in foam cut
outs. James Connolly. Padraig Pearse. Plunkett. The green uniforms. The Sam Brown belts. If you
look closely you can see that they are in fact figures from some other war painted to resemble rebels
from 1916. I want to believe in them but I can't. Need is not quite belief. I line them up on the
windowsill and asked them to recite the Black Proclamation.

Willie John Cunningham was the Carlingford Lough pilot. His death notice was in the paper. He
smuggled the material for my wedding dress from Omeath to Greencastle across the lough, my
mother said. The dress hung in an old wardrobe for years. Handsewn sequins on a white
background. At night the lost brides are out there on the mudflats and shallows. With the curlews
and terns. You can hear them calling to their husbands.
The Black Proclamation does not mention the history of the defeated.
I stepped through the ruins of the rear of the house. The kitchen appeared untouched. There were
cups and plates on the table. Estate invoices spilling from a bureau drawer. There was a tapping
noise from somewhere in the house. A branch against a window pane. I walked into the hallway.
The fire damage was worse here. Charred timber. The staircase hung in the air. A black cat watched
me from the top step as if its presence had been written some time before.
That was it for me. I ran away from Warings house and stopped at Mary White's shop on the way
home. The shop was small with a low ceiling. Mary asked me where I had been. I told her. She
leaned over her dark counter. The night I was born the soldiers took my mother to DG Warings in
the back of a lorry.
In the basement of that house they stripped her naked and searched her. As they were stripping the
pregnant woman DG Waring circled her. Mary said she was wearing 'an Italian Officers uniform'
and 'carried a cane which she tapped against her leather boots.'
Mary's mother went into labour on the floor of the lorry as it carried her from the house into the
cold Easter night.

Men in crumpled suits. Tired-looking. Losing more than they win. The bullet struck his pelvis and
richocheted upwards through his heart. Compromised. Disheartened. They are waiting in their
buses. In the taxi ranks. At the gospel hall. In the hospital car park. In the dread night. In their
mobile shops. At the dinner table. On their own street. In their own shops. At the checkpoint
bookies school quiet streets where they once dreamed of love. They know their time is limited. The
Black Proclamation calls upon the dead generations of the future not those of the past.
Colm came to the door the night they died. My mother opened it. They had been to school together
It was a stormy night. Where is he now my chief my master this bleak night mavrone she said
quietly. Cold, cold bitterly cold is this night for Hugh. Its speary showery arrows pierceth him
through and through pierceth him to the very bone, Colm said. Recite to me, my mother said, the
Black Proclamation.
The Black proclamation requires you to dishonour it with cowardice, inhumanity and rapine.
The Court Martial Prosecutor William Wylie wrote about Constance Markievicz in a private letter
sent in 1939. I am only a woman you cannot shoot a woman you must not shoot a woman....she
never stopped moaning the whole time she was in the court room...We were all slightly disgusted. I
won't say any more, it revolts me still. But this is what people do in war. Men and women. They
moan. They are paralysed with fear. I dream of soldiers running from a checkpoint explosion at the
border, throwing their weapons away and squealing. They inform and denounce others that they
might live.
The Black Proclamation requires that you revolt the British.
The text of the Black Proclamation contains language which some might find offensive. The Black
Proclamation is subject to terms and conditions. The authors of the Black Proclamation bear no
responsibilty.
We lay awake listening to the bands and the preacher in the town at the bottom of the hill as he read
from the book of death.
The Black Proclamation stands above you armed with an automatic rifle. The bullets pass through
you and splinter on the floor beneath you and the Black Proclamation is afraid of being hit by a
richochet. The Black Proclamation is waiting in a lonely farmhouse. The Black Procalamation does
not torture but uses inhuman and degrading treatment.
The Black Proclamation sets the tilt switch. The Black Proclamation makes the warning call using
an identified code word. The Black Proclamation kicks down the door. The Black Proclamation
cites national security. The Black Proclamation walks in the funeral procession weeping. The Black
Proclamation controls the media. The Black Proclamation wouldn't have one about the place.
A few weeks ago a friend stood at his fathers graveside. Like my own father a beautiful, ruined
man. His uncle turned to him. You have to remember that we came from a generation of men who
were destroyed by the North. As they fade away they turn to look for their lonely wives but cannot
see them.

Here at Greencastle the beach is scoured by the tide. Dark weed, empty paint tins from the boats.
The southern shore is half a mile away. On the Blockhouse Island cormorants hold their wings aloft.
It is said that they are messengers from this world to the underworld and that they hold their wings
that way to hide their shame.
Forty-five years after I climbed over DG Warings gates I wake at night.
I hear her swagger stick. Tap tap tap.
The skeletal dogs have broken from their graves. Teeth rotted. Bone eyesockets askew.
Tap tap tap.
Where are you going, she says.
I haven't finished with you.

Our Dust by C.D.Wright 1949-2016

I am your ancestor. You know next-to-nothing
about me.
There is no reason for you to imagine
the rooms I occupied or my heavy hair.
Not the faint vinegar smell of me. Or
the rubbed damp
of Forrest and I coupling on the landing
en route to our detached day.
You didnt know my weariness, error, incapacity,
I was the poet
of shadow work and towns with quarter-inch
phone books, of failed
roadside zoos. The poet of yard eggs and
sharpening shops,
jobs at the weapons plant and the Maybelline
factory on the penitentiary road.
A poet of spiderwort and jacks-in-the-pulpit,
hollyhocks against the tool shed.
An unsmiling dark blond.
The one with the trowel in her handbag.
I dug up protected and private things.
That sort, I was.
My graves went undecorated and my churches
abandoned. This wasnt planned, but practice.
I was the poet of short-tailed cats and yellow
line paint.
Of satellite dishes and Peterbilt trucks. Red Man
Chewing Tobacco, Black Cat Fireworks, Triple Hut
Creme Soda. Also of dirt dobbers, nightcrawlers,
martin houses, honey, and whetstones
from the Novaculite Uplift. What remained
of The Uplift.
I had registered dogs 4 sale; rocks, dung,
and straw.
I was a poet of hummingbird hives along with
redhead stepbrothers.
The poet of good walking shoesa necessity
in vernacular partsand push mowers.
The rumor that I was once seen sleeping
in a refrigerator box is false (he was a brother
who hated me).
Nor was I the one lunching at the Governors
mansion.
I didnt work off a grid. Or prime the surface
if I could get off without it. I made
simple music
out of sticks and string. On side B of me,
experimental guitar, night repairs and suppers
such as this.
You could count on me to make a bad situation
worse like putting liquid make-up over
a passion mark.
I never raised your rent. Or anyone elses by God.

Never said I loved you. The future gave me chills.

I used the medium to say: Arise arise and
come together.
Free your children. Come on everybody. Lets start
with Baltimore.
Believe me I am not being modest when I
admit my life doesnt bear repeating. I
agreed to be the poet of one life,
one death alone. I have seen myself
in the black car. I have seen the retreat
of the black car.