Ulster Flashback

Abstract

This poem emerges from fieldwork in Northern Ireland and rambles in the north woods of my home state. A dreamlike transcultural diffusion of embodied symbolism has the persona inhabiting home and field at once. In this instance, nature’s affordances and the martial atmosphere of Michigan hunting season evoke murals, bonfires and the marching season in Belfast. The opportunity for casual violence resonates across settings, and the possibility of the participant observer becoming collateral damage is a real one. The poem ends in a matter-of-fact manner, dramatizing both the mundane nature of risk and the fluidity of our experience of spatiotemporal translation.