I don't visit Belfast as often as I should. I was born there and grew up as a Bob Dylan-imitating teenager in the almost mythical days before 1969.
I come from a Belfast of swings chained up in Sunday playgrounds, red-bricked Protestant schools with enviable plush green playing fields and Saturday afternoon music sessions in The Pound, down by the Markets area.
There was always fun whenever Glentoran Football Club, our team, the "Cock 'n' Hens", from east Belfast, under the heroic leadership of one-time Glasgow Celtic player John Colraine, met Linfield, "the Blues".
I remember vividly the starlings around Belfast City Hall, viewed in their swirling madness from the top deck of a growling bus, and the year Queen's University students climbed out on the greeny dome and painted on its front, in enormous white letters, the initials of their outrageous rag-week magazine, P.T.Q.
Still visible today
The lettering could be seen all the way up Royal Avenue and the grey marks of the paint-over job are still visible today. The initials are from the first three words of Belfast's motto: Pro Tanto Quid Retribuamus.
I hadn't been in the grand and grandiose City Hall for many years. My father took me there one day and showed me, under glass, the Covenant, signed in blood. The City Hall, in ways, is Belfast. There is something proud, arrogant, beautiful and sad about its size, its marble, its statues, its pictures, its gleaming halls.
Inside, you look up to the dome, a sort of secular St Peter's, though that description probably doesn't occur to too many people walking under it. The City Hall is about Belfast's glory days, days of powerful industry, of mills, full order-books in the shipyard, the largest rope works in the world, in the Bri my grandfather as secretary of East Belfast Constitutional Workingmen's Club, stiff collars, the Titanic, rectitude, an empire to serve.
The building's insides are lined with reminders of the war dead of Belfast, on land and sea. My grandfather served in the Royal Navy in the first World War and had his medals to prove it. I can remember too his sash; I'm one of those born-with-a-foot-in-either-camp Ulstermen, and, not surprisingly, there are a lot of us.
Medals are worn by the immaculately turned out, elegantly senior attendants inside the City Hall's entrance. I was there recently for the publication of You Can't Eat Flags for Breakfast, an anthology of poems by "poets, politicians and public", reflecting on the Troubles.
Anthology of poems
Compiled by Joshua Schultz and Joseph Sheehy, it is published by the New Belfast Community Arts' Initiative, a wide-ranging and energetic cultural body. The launch, attended by more than 200 people, took place with a small jazz band in the City Hall's portrait-lined Banquet Hall. The deservedly eminent poet Michael Longley assisted in launching the anthology, part of a grander reconciliatory project which has produced poems in public places all over Belfast and even on T-shirts.
Martin Lynch's introductory remarks included: "I remember years ago, Michael Longley - now unquestionably our most illustrious resident poet in Northern Ireland . . ." He mentioned Michael twice more before he was done. I thought the laudatory offerings, as they multiplied, a tad overcooked. I retreated behind the table of food.
The Banquet Hall was gorged with poets. Padraic Fiacc was present, a poet who, in my view, deserves some special award for his services to poetry in Belfast. His voice is close to its people, its everyday heart. His is a rugged, uncompromising poetry, steeped in the city's experience. He has not received the critical appraisal he deserves.
Gerald Dawe, now teaching in Trinity, was visible, as was Joan McBreen, Galway poet and anthologist, collecting contributors' signatures in the cover of her copy of the anthology. Another Belfast poet, Brendan Hamill, a friend of Fiacc, was also present, as was Fortnight's literary editor, the poet Moyra Donaldson.
There was much signing of books. At one point I rambled into a hallway and had my photograph taken under an oddly sepia-toned portrait of Sammy Wilson and Rhonda Paisley. Behind them, the front of the City Hall is draped with a banner proclaiming "Ulster Says No". In the Banquet Hall the cameras flashed.
Poet and singer
On this very worthy evening, I was reminded of the late James Simmons, founder of the Honest Ulsterman, poet and singer, who passed away recently at his home at The Poets' House, Falcarragh, Co Donegal. His openness and poetic courage, not favoured by everyone, even possibly feared by some, was a constant reminder to many less courageous and more ambitious poets of what poetry should be and what it should do. He was a people's poet in the best sense.
Then, in a wink, the Banquet Hall emptied. People said goodbye: I was told later that such hasty departures were part of the social norm in Belfast, where people grew edgy after dark. I'm not sure about that.
Darkness was still a while off. We flopped out into a clubbing, disco-bound Belfast with nowhere to go. Behind us, the grand old City Hall loomed up into the city sky, and seemed even to grow. Poets, suitably wined, fed and lectured, poured out of its marble innards. The immaculately uniformed attendants with their hard-earned medals, harder won than any prize for poetry, looked on impassively.