For Elaine Ireland

One day you walked into the kitchen
with the plastic bucket and spade I bought you
for Christmas in 1973.
You had a new game, you said.
It was called digging a grave for daddy.

In time, your enterprise produced a hollow
by the lancewood
and a spare hole for mummy.
But mummy was luckier than I was.
She got a prayer
and a crushed posy of dandelions and daisies.

It was an incremental death
that saw a family tree of superfluous Irelands
interred at the end of the garden,
each marked by a stone or rickety cross.
I wrote the inscription for a plaque.

The cat took a professional interest
in the earthworks,
and was given a summary lesson
in the importance of ceremony.
Even at five, you knew how it helps us to deal
with the messiness of being human.

But the plaque proved awkward,
and the plastic tools from Father Christmas
unequal to the arguments of heavy clay.
Besides, a cemetery called for commitment,
for a tedious decorum.

At the primary school in Shamrock Street,
you found a simpler world,
more terse communication —
swipes with wounding words,
and surreptitious blows to the solar plexus
that made metaphor redundant.

Back home, the witch's broom,
abruptly shorn of the supernatural,
was forced to address itself to fallen leaves
and wrappings from the corner store.
Scorn was heaped on 'childish games'.

For those who had lain for so long
under the lancewood,
it was equally hard to adjust to the change.
Often, you made us feel like
the bones on a dish after chicken dinner.
Yet somehow, we went on living.