Matthew Sweeney
Irish poet
WS 2000/01
| The House The house had a dozen bedrooms, each of them cold, and the wind battered the windows and blew down power-lines to leave the house dark. Rats lived in the foundations, sending scouts under the stairs for a year or two, and once a friendly ghost was glimpsed at the foot of a bed. Downhill half a mile was the Atlantic, with its ration of the drowned -- one of whom visited the house, carried there on a door. It hosted dry corpses, too, with nostrils huge to a child, but never a murder -- except the lambs bled dry in the yard outside. Sunlight never took over the interior, and after dark the cockroaches came from under a cupboard to be eaten by the dog. Crows were always sitting on the wires, planning nests in the chimneys, and a shotgun sometimes blew a few away. Neighbours never entered as often as in other houses, but it did have a piano upstairs. And I did grow up there. |
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