Michael Spring is an occasional poet who lives and works in London, for a small corporate design and marketing company. He has some fiction coming up later in the year in the Fast Forward anthology, and when he has time, he reviews drama and the arts for London's Fringe Report.

A Large Scotch for Reggie (June 20, 2010. Issue 18.)

Belfast. 1970.
The plane banks above Cave Hill,
The lough, the moon on the sea.
Below, fired by inadequacy, trapped
Behind closed doors, desperate,
Pasty fingers fumble at kitchen tables
Pushing wires into doughy balls.
Seething, wretched, unlikely,
They ease back the oiled bolts,
Gaze down telescope barrels at pictures,
Ripped from the daily press,
Slide copper-sheathed steel into place,
Ready to smear black on black
The old tribal ways with new metal.
A small light blinks above the tenements,
A throbbing tranquillity, as dogs howl,
As the dead man’s hand appears in
Poker games north and south, as fear
Stalks the wet grass, the bars and
The shopping streets, Reggie orders
His large Scotch, with an abdication
And a prophesy of biblical proportion.

(In 1970, Reggie Maudling became British Home Secretary. At the end of his first visit to Northern Ireland, as the plane took off, he famously demanded, “Someone get me a large Scotch,” and commented, “What a bloody awful country.”)