Through

Ciaran Carson (2008)

Irrevocable? Never irrevocable, you said,
picking me up wrong through the din of the coffee machine.

We were in the Ulster Milk Bar I think they blew up back
in the seventies. We must have been barely acquainted.

Noise is what surrounds us, I’d said earlier, gesturing
to the wider world of disinformation, the dizzy

spells that come when someone you know might have been in a bomb
as the toll has not yet been reckoned except by hearsay.

I’d have my ear glued to the radio, waiting for what
passed for the truth to come out, men picking through the rubble.

Some of the victims would appear in wedding photographs
blinded by a light forever gone. Graveside by graveside

I shake hands with men I have not shaken hands with for years,
trying to make out their faces through what they have become.