Niall McDevitt

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The Catholic

I walk in the days of the Protestant inquisition,
I walk in Protestant days as in Celsius days.
Sins drop in the wind. I pick them up like money
lost and found in a street, wrongheaded money.
There is no safehouse to go to, no sanctuary on tap
and no transubstantiated bread for sale.
                                                                         When I dip
my fingers into the water stoup, it’s dry
as my forehead is dry, my pineal gland is dry.
The holy ghost sues for an absentee landlord
to whom ground rent is owing in the next life.
In the form of a black but wingless dove, I flit
from priest-hole to priest-hole. My foot bleeds
from the stigma. No public cry of help is allowed
and any prayers that escape do so as pollutants.

                                        +

I flee from the days of the Protestant inquisition
to a closet where a candle burns out the oxygen.
Salve Regina

Niall McDevitt was the author of three collections of poetry, b/w (Waterloo Press, 2010), Porterloo (International Times, 2013) and Firing Slits, Jerusalem Colportage (New River Press, 2016). He was also known for his psychogeographical, psychohistorical walks such as The William Blake Walk, An Arthur Rimbaud Drift, A Chaucer London Pilgrimage, The Kensington Modernists, and many others. As art-activist he campaigned to save the Rimbaud-Verlaine house in Mornington Crescent, and against overdevelopment of sites near Blake’s burial ground in Bunhill Fields. In 2016 he performed his poetry in Iraq at the Babylon Festival.

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