Clongriffin

This ghost town succumbs

To the haze

And towers over me

With soaked insignificance.

The buildings’ monotony

Harks back to the days of Ballymun,

With some of the locals

Even deigning to call their apartments

“Flats.”

The people who live here

Do not form the society anybody expected;

A bustling city centre with

Rich business types should

Have blossomed from here:

Instead, immigrants and “riff-raff”

Make up a population

Quite tolerable for now -

But an implosion awaits.

Boarded up land contains

A burnt out car and nothing more.

Vodafone and JD sports

Should be there,

While a Superquinn and a Centra

Threaten emptily to open their doors

To a tumult of silence.

At least the train station can carry off

Those who give this place a faint pulse.

Bloodied women remain,

Screaming of infidelity

(unaware of the word’s existence);

Antagonising teens mope,

Abusing homosexuality with

Their indifferent use of its standard term*,

Before pleading their age

With yarns once spun by

My generation, though not by me.

Yet this dull, despairing place

Has within it some rough diamonds

That make it worthwhile to see -

The young woman with the British accent,

Or Captain Lotto, the bus conductor,

And let us not forget our regular,

So forward in his being that he once

Decked my manager in the face

(With reconciliation, because both are men).

And there are other champions, too,

Like the woman with the keenest gaze

Who enquires after me with sincerity,

And my old P.E. teacher

Who forgot my name though not quite me,

And my colleagues,

Who make everyday in this place

Barely living bearable:

Because they are my friends.

And that once wily proprietor

Is the cause and effect of it all,

Though this is an unmitigated mutation

Of his own dream,

A dream which saw 40,000 people

Laden with money and ambition

Flock to what should have been

A future hub of the nation’s capital -

With Sporting Fingal on their breast.

And while he may lament at

The stripped down version of his vision -

Filled with people he may not want -

I say this place is better than his dream

For one very simple reason:

This Clongriffin is real,

And is here, now, waiting to implode

And produce far more for this country

Than he ever dreamt it would.

*ie, abuse by teenagers of the word 'gay'