‘The Younger Brother’ by Randall Stephen Hall

The Younger Brother.

by Randall Stephen Hall © 11.2.17

You fumble your thoughts

Like a dropped ball

Or string of prayer beads.

Each narrow moment

A blanket, to cover

Your scraped knees

And the burnt elbows

Of a damaged nationalism.

I am the small child

To you, the bully.

You tug and pull me.

Push and shove me

To be something

That I am not

And neither are you.

For you never ever were

This imagined thing.

You know better than me

Or so I am told, by you.

But I am stubborn.

I am thran.

As thran as any Derry whan.

I do not give up

Or give in easily, to thoughts

With poor architecture.

It’s the way I’m made

Or rather, the grade

Of my blue slate

To your hard rain.

You bounce off the slope

And the angle of my sharp roof

To just pour down the drain

Until the next time.

You evaporate upwards.

Heading for the cloud

And an imagined archive

Of heroes, invaders

And nothing in between.

That’s a real narrow

Catholic, middle class dream.

You could write upon me

And my blue slate.

But I would only rub it off

To find my own words

To add up and calculate

Who I am and where I’m at.

Until you send more rain

To soak my rough door mat.

For I am an Irish man.

But that uncomfortable thing.

A Northern, Irish, man.

An illegitimate bastard child

To your twisted ideas

Of family.

All the world can see that.

But you have yet to waken up

To that fact or even get it.

It rests upon my tongue

Like an expectant butterfly.

For my one broken wing

And the pull of yours, equally crippled

Could create a wind

To shake the trees

On the other side of the world.

Will you join me?