Wall

Walls, especially high ones, are both symbolic and actual. Their naked facticity has always intrigued me. There are probably higher walls in Ireland than those of The Central Mental Hospital in Dundrum (Mountjoy Prison may be one example) but Dundrum's are imposing enough, and they offer a stark contrast to the workaday life in this densely populated suburban location with all its little businesses and residential houses lined along a very busy main road.

I was brought up next to a similar, though not quite as high wall, as we lived in Stillorgan Grove, across the road from the old Saint John of God's asylum.

Speaking of more symbolic walls though, there is this:

Walls

Into this dim, book-cluttered apartment (a submarine
submerged in the avenue’s green)

I invite the shades
of Brodsky, Milosz, Neruda, who have touched barricades

imagining if these harmless words
had their visa revoked, passport confiscated

by some apparatchik or ‘activist’ whose day has come,
all writers to be struck almost dumb

unless they join the shadow-mob, fling a brick
for uniformed Freedom, lift

from a starred window a fistful of jewellery
or flat-screen TV ––

and there we are, groping our way up to The Gods
in the Olympia in the 1980s

to make out far below the white shadow
of Marcel Marceau

whose hard-pressed silences speak
for what rises between us, what we try to break.