A REFUSAL TO MOURN He lived in a small farm-house At the edge of a new estate. The trim gardens crept To his door, and car engines Woke him before dawn On dark winter mornings. All day there was silence In the bright house. The clock Ticked on the kitchen shelf, Cinders moved in the grate, And a warm briar gurgled When the old man talked to himself; But the door-bell seldom rang After the milkman went, And if a shirt-hanger Knocked in an open wardrobe That was a strange event To be pondered on for hours. While the wind thrashed about In the back garden, raking The roof of the hen-house, And swept clouds and gulls Eastwards over the lough With its flap of tiny sails. Once a week he would visit An old shipyard crony, Inching down to the road And the blue country bus To sit and watch sun-dappled Branches whacking the windows While the long evening shed Weak light in his empty house, On the photographs of his dead Wife and their six children And the Missions to Seamen angel In flight above the bed. "I'm not long for this world," Said he on our last evening, "I'll not last the winter," And grinned, straining to hear Whatever reply I made; And died the following year. In time the astringent rain Of those parts will clean The words from his gravestone In the crowded cemetery That overlooks the sea And his name be mud once again And his boilers lie like tombs In the mud of the sea bed Till the next ice age comes And the earth he inherited Is gone like Neanderthal Man And no records remain. But the secret bred in the bone On the dawn strand survives In other times and lives, Persisting for the unborn Like a claw-print in concrete After the bird has flown. -- Derek Mahon, b. Belfast 1941