House Martins
The house martins nest in the curve of my downpipe,
in the first house I’ve owned. They return year on year
to patch the same spot, rear broods, till they fledge
for themselves. Maybe some spring, they’ll recycle
their ancestors’ mud huts nestled in my gutters.
Across the river squat the skeletons of ghost estates—
semi-hatched, semi-detached with high-end windows
and stone feature walls. Willow and buddleia
marking time since the crash, waiting on the final fix.
We returnees are boomeranging, in a housing crisis
between mica and the rising sea. To nurse relatives,
seek refuge in the NHS, to no longer feel foreign.
But where is the rest? I borrow from family, gamble
at auction on an unmortgageable flood house,
uninsurable against the burn. At the foot of my garden,
defenses scheduled for 2027, updated by an owners’
whats app group if it’s sandbag time.
The house martins dart from the eaves
in my cul-de-sac, sing above roaming charges,
vehicle import tax, driving tests, and PPS numbers.
Just as the birds are readying to leave, we house
another cross-cultural couple, seeking a perch.
By New Year, they’ve gone south to Malta.
Landlords evict tenants to profit from crisis.
Home ownership is—the flat can’t be sold
because NAMA lost the deeds to the hallway.
Or after Grenfell, my friend’s tower block
is a fire risk; powerless, she watches
as a metal girder crashes her balcony at 3 a.m.
Breaking a window was one way I squatted shelter,
an eBayed boat another. A flock was my security,
until they turned on me.
Before we handed over shelter, were we like
the house martins in my gutter? Rebuilding and
repairing year on year, gathering homes
from mud, sticks, and ancestors.
NA
Working in Walls
The steering committee discusses remedial works
to the crack that frost has formed. This spider
webby fissure finds its way from the rusted
metal box of the Dog Leg that corrugates from
the so called peace wall to the sandstone
of the city walls. We have so many ways of
avoiding, naming this city, even call her Maiden,
as in virgin, never entered. Is it worth repairing
what we’re funded to remove? Even if no one
Expects us to succeed? “Not in my lifetime”
says the taxi driver cum security guard, who I know
from banter in the neutral space of the train station,
who has lived opposite the chain link his whole life.
He resents the encroachments, lack of consultation,
the organisation I work for. Three times in one day
I say – I’m not Sinn Fein like a Peter, denying
an affiliation everyone sees. I want to say
we were never a Sinn Fein family.
My dad told stories of painting playgrounds
in the 70s in the Shankill, riding Peace Trains,
knowing the women who got the Nobel long
before they gave it to the politicians. At dinner,
they’d recall the Civil Rights Movement, cutting
across fields to avoid road blocks, singing
‘we shall overcome’, watching a bomb go off.
Stood in my bedroom, packing for Donegal,
Dad knew exactly what shook our windows,
changed my 13 year old world, delayed the
holiday and Dad kept leaving to work on it.
Here I work now, in the city, where we would
come in the 90s for banned substances like
McDonalds and Tammy Girl, in the brand new
Foyleside or to crowd surf in the Nerve Centre.
Forty-Five miles from my hometown, after decades
as a foreigner, I’m the outsider, trying to rise above
these walls like my uncle working in the protestant
paper while a GAA lifer. My teenage rebellion
was rugby and attending a protestant service.
Even then I was working on unwalling.
I wonder what the Iranian, renting for 200 a month
in the Loyalist Fountain, thinks of our little war,
of our walls, of how we divine who people are
with schools and surnames. That after all this work
it might be our weather that brings down our walls.