The dying synagogue at South Terrace

by Thomas McCarthy

Chocolate-coloured paint and the July sun

like a blow-torch peeling off

the last efforts of love.

More than time has abandoned this,

God's abandonment, God's synagogue,

that rose out of the ocean

one hundred years from here.

The peeling paint is an emmigrant's

guide to America - lost on the shore

at Cobh, to be torn and scored

by a city of luftmenshn;

Catholics, equally poor, equally driven.

To have been through everything,

to have suffered everything and left

a peeling door. Yahweh is everywhere,

wherever abandonment is needed -

a crow rising after an accident,

wearing the grey uniform

of a bird of carrion, a badger

waiting for the bones of life

to crack before letting go:

wishing the tenth cantor to die,

the Synagogue to become a damp wall,

the wailing mouths to fester.

Too small. To be a small people

aligned to nothing is to suffer blame

like a thief in the night. An activist

threw a petrol-bomb for Palestine:

the sky opened and rained hail

like snow-drops. Flowers for memory,

petrol for the far-away.

To name one's land is to be a cuckoo

pushing others, bird-like, into a pit:

until, at the end, every sacred gesture

becomes vain, soiling the Synagogue

door like the charcoal corpses

at Mauthausen Station, 1944. A few

survived in the green valley of know-

nothing: spent themselves putting boots

on the Catholic poor, counting the brown

pennies, the corncrakes on their

trade routes, and the guerilla raids.

To sit here now, in the rancid sunshine

of low tide, is to contemplate

all of the unnoticed work of love -

exquisite children fall like jewels

from an exhausted colporteur's bag:

a mid-century daughter practises piano,

an etude to forget terror; a brother

dreams of the artistic life, another

shall practise law and become, in time,

the Catholic's tall Lord Mayor.

Where these jewels fall beside the peeling

door, let us place the six lilies of memory;

the six wounds of David's peeling star.