Dante's Judas

From the breakdown ripples of culture, from the tattered remnants of
the glory land, emerged a new way of living. Within this cold surreal
mist, I was born under the southern light. Alone I leapt, lithe and
lonely into the world. Shrieking and puckered pimpley in the frozen
air, I was still gasping the first few vital breaths when they tied my
severed umbilical cord to the door of the seventh nitrate freezer on
the edge of town. It would hang there until tensix ages had passed, a
symbol in the thin veil between mythology and poverty, to preserve my
life in a crumbling reality.

In childhood, often in the endless diesel drizzle, my brothers and I
would play tear-fishing and spooks down by the freezers, or sail bottle
lids along the oily rainbow rivers that formed in the scorch tracks
that ran towards lumnock. Mammy warned us not to get too near the
freezers, but we could not resist daring each other to touch the shiny
sub-zero metal with our tongues, cold iron blood the taste of boyhood.
Mammy said that the freezers contained the bodies of people who had
lived before the land was scorched; men from the world I had seen only
in dreams and picture books. They waited in there for science to grant
them a resurrection but Ma said they were frozen like Dante's Judas,
condemned to hell for their treachery. Never mind resurrection, they
would scream for salvation, sorrow slipping silently from their starved
souls, replaced with screaming fear. Da said that was just a story and
that the freezers held nothing more exciting than water supplies and
sanitation chemicals for the residential areas.

The Residential areas covered about 25 flat miles to the south of
Lumnock. We only ever went as far North as the School on the border.
There was only one school down the end of a narrow road that was one
long dug-up trench - a yawning concrete chasm. The pavements were still
standing and fenced off to keep us out of the road. All sorts of boys
and girls, from toddlers wearing nothing but shorts, to huge ugly
teenagers, poured into the school grounds, free food, though greasy and
lukewarm ensured our attendance most days. I often used to hide in the
cool, quiet interior of the school pastoral centre. White plaster sugar
walls, broken with the icons of the trinity and the hope of my
redemption cacooned me fom the smoky hysterior on the exterior,
stretching to the periphery of the grounds. Amidst this chaos my story
began.

Lord you have called me.
Heard my whispered name
among the rushes on the stream.
Saw the amber red of evening
beam and burst across the sky plains,
disperse the love-pains of the evening
as I swam towards the light.