The Weather in Belfast

In deep night, I ping to crystal life
Windows, layered and luminous.
Flick, flick, flick, flick … flick
Toward a tabled trove of weather,
A legacy of love and longing:
London (daughter’s daughter cries),
Wuhan (son reading Lao Tzu sighs),
Belfast (mother lives and later dies).

I see Black Mountain, low and broody,
Hurling its rain at clustered streets,
Thrumming the bedroom glass.
She calibrated to the weather like
A fisherman or an anxious farmer,
Took winter personally, like a malediction,
Anything less than 14 degrees, an indignity,
Sent her rummaging for the cashmere.

Of the inner climate? I recall the thunder-
Strikes of the seventies, rage detonating
With the bombs on Gt Victoria Street,
And impatience like an April squall,
And generosity like a fair fortnight in July,
And an autumn long and calm and alone.
That mother, that childhood, far away –
Such weather here as she’d not believe.

TDBT Oct 21