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By Ciarán Carson b. 1948 Ciaran Carson

They had questioned him for hours. Who exactly was he? And when

He told them, they questioned him again. When they accepted who he was, as

Someone not involved, they pulled out his fingernails. Then

They took him to a waste-ground somewhere near the Horseshoe Bend, and told him

What he was. They shot him nine times.

A dark umbilicus of smoke was rising from a heap of burning tyres.

The bad smell he smelt was the smell of himself. Broken glass and knotted Durex.

The knuckles of a face in a nylon stocking. I used to see him in the Gladstone Bar,

Drawing pints for strangers, his almost perfect fingers flecked with scum.

Source: Selected Poems (Wake Forest University Press, 2001)

Biography

Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, into an Irish-speaking family, poet Ciarán Carson attended Queen’s University, Belfast. He held the position of traditional arts officer of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland from 1975 to 1998 and was appointed director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University in 2003. Carson is the author of a number of collections of poetry, including The Irish for No (1987), winner of . . .

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