When I think of Titanic, she always brings me back to Belfast. To the shipyard where my granddad worked many, many years after she was built. To the docks and the slipways which I’ll only ever know in that way through photographs. The graving dock. Queens Road where it was. Tram to the yard. Steel against steel, shouts echoing in open air. The gantry hangs her like a ghost behind the workers. Every square inch, Irish hands. 1909 and then 1958.

Belfast now is a dream I have in black and white. 

               you are Manannán Mac Lir, 
               pushing rain up from the sea.

               in Belfast 
               you could stretch only to the lighthouse, 

               now the sun’s yellow leaves 
               relinquish on the ground, crumbling 

               like cathedrals without heaven to hold.

               go spaciously now and let moonlight moor 
               the sun back to its soul

               let time confide her Emerald seams.

               you are the river’s long drunk hands, 
               reaching toward the ocean

               you are the patient silence between echoes  

               the invisible ache of Éire

My father was born during an extremely violent summer in Belfast. That violence eventually pushed my family out. In another world, we never would’ve left. Returning now is like walking through a fever just before it breaks. There’s a peripheral understanding of something not quite reachable. In Celtic mythology, Manannán mac Lir (Son of the Sea) is the sea god of the otherworld— Tír na nÓg, or: the land of eternal youth. Tír na nÓg is a human place, full of people who know sorrow but do not experience it. Every utopia is a hardly disguised dystopia. 

Shipbuilding in Belfast was coming to its end around the time my father was born. But shipbuilding made Belfast what it is, in part. That’s not what people know of Belfast. To most, it’s not beautiful, not hopeful, not alive. Before I decided to go home I had a long dream about circles. Patterned loops. Walking through a small circle. Slicing a circle and watching the line go flat. Walking to the edge of that line and tipping my body forward just enough to see down into the water. Diving off. A ship making its way to France. Why France? I’m unsure. I dreamt it all and then it all started happening. My grandmother died, my father went home and stood looking out at the sea. I’ll never know what he felt then. Van Morrison on a small speaker. I had another dream. This time of Orcas thrashing against the violent surf, making their way toward me. In these dreams I was never afraid of anything. It was as though everything in my life was meeting to take me home. And sometimes the way home is difficult, but you make it anyway, don’t you?

I fell in love with Belfast. I wrote a book of poems. Things change. Cities and the people in them. Everything is moving, but it’s the same parts every time. There’s a fixed number of units that fit into a life, a world. In Belfast you walk into a pub—no this isn’t a joke, and you see your father there, holding a Guinness. This is the oldest pub in the city. If you’ve been, you know the one. The last dregs of daylight are shimmering off the street, wet with rain. I put my back against the wall. Children dance in here to trad tunes. My father isn’t really here, and at the same time he is here a thousand times over and again. In Belfast you stretch only to the lighthouse, and then it’s dark all the way to the seafloor under the Lough, where that 46,000 ton wonder ship once drew a line through the water. That same water I slip my feet into now just 15 minutes up the road. 

In dream I’m standing at the edge of the Lough and there’s an old grey wall keeping me from it. It curves around me, like a circle. I look up and the world tilts. I walk through the small circle. 

The sea welcomes me. I’m home now.