"The Ice Cream Man," by Michael Longley

Rum and raisin, vanilla, butter-scotch, walnut, peach:
You would rhyme off the flavours. That was before
They murdered the ice-cream man on the Lisburn Road
And you bought carnations to lay outside his shop.
I named for you all the wild flowers of the Burren
I had seen in one day: thyme, valerian, loosestrife,
Meadowsweet, tway blade, crowfoot, ling, angelica,
Herb robert, marjoram, cow parsley, sundew, vetch,
Mountain avens, wood sage, ragged robin, stitchwort,
Yarrow, lady’s bedstraw, bindweed, bog pimpernel.

+ Michael Longley

One of the most understated, powerful antiwar poems ever written, “The Ice Cream Man” is bracketed by two lists: the first in a child’s voice, filled with delight and anticipation, and the second in Longley’s voice, reciting for the child another list of marvels. Between these two lists is an act of war in Northern Ireland, the murder of an ice cream man, a senseless loss of life the child seeks to honor with a gift.

As the lives of Ukrainians continue to be shattered in ways large and small, such poems can help us witness to war’s insanity, mourn what is lost, and hope for the peace we pray will come.

The poem’s closing list of wildflowers is heartbreaking, defiant, haunting, and heartening. Is it meant to take the child’s mind off the murder? To gently distract from how the tendrils of war creep into everyday life, brutal and indifferent? Or is the list a form of consolation, a way of insisting that the world is nevertheless a place of abundant beauty, for those willing to seek it out? Or is it an indictment of the appalling wastefulness of war itself, the foolish, grotesque way it turns its back on life and runs toward ruin? Or is it all of these things, and more?

Listen to Longley read the poem here.

Michael Longley is the author of more than 20 books of poetry. He served as professor of poetry for Ireland from 2007 to 2010, and has received the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize — and in 2015, was honored with the Freedom of the City of Belfast.