Hard Border

So much talk of backstops and borders
bad politics heralding a return
to a history no one wants to see
repeated

so they tell us stories
instead: so many urban legends
that are probably untrue

like, have you heard the one about the house
in Pettigo, partitioned through the middle

or the Belfast woman shoving butter down her socks
the brainy British official beckoning her near
for a friendly fireside chat, all that offending
sticky yellow warm pissing past her legs

or the crafty fisherfellow on that disputed estuary
between Donegal and Derry

who painted his vessel two conflicting colours
so he could fish in the liminal lake without a fig for quotas,
buzzing busy as a worker bee between both harbours

or the bold schoolboy on his bicycle
pedaling across each day
customs guards turning his pockets inside out,
their notions upside down,

finding nothing,
until lines were lifted,
checkpoints closed, guns given up,

then they asked him what it was,
the precious cargo he’d been smuggling
all those years

— they thought he’d never come around,
and he said, like any boy that age —
bicycles

because what could we love
any more
than the things which give us wings?


— Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe, from Writing Home: The ‘New Irish’ Poets