and lighting our darkness with a cacophony of sound;
while their souls, believing, were long gone from their sacrificial offerings.
They were liberating me, though I was drinking in a beer-keller:
shutting out the obscenity: clinging to life.
"It's OK" I said. "He's with us. We'll get him home."
Swift as the night owl they had us in their talons.
Mercifully and out of sight, they wanted him for a quiet word,
while leaving me to contemplate their metallic limbs - spreadeagled.
As if from nowhere they appeared in the doorway. wise men from the East
eye-balling, and wanting to know what the no good pigs were up to.
It was my soul they were after, and all I had to do was get stuck in.
"I'm a doctor," he said, ignoring my gospel of peace.
"You may be a doctor, but that doesn't make you God!"
In the darkness, this new gospel made his friend nervous.
__________
© Cormac McCloskey
The backdrop to this poem is an I.R.A. bombing campaign in England in the 1970s. "Pig": slang for police.
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