Mort A Bangor. (Translation) . Poem by Michael Walker

The poem is part of a longer elegy to his mother, who died in Bangor, Northern Ireland. There were not many of them at her funeral by the sea in Co. Down. He is her only son, and he has mixed feelings about her death: it is 'a cold epitaph', the tone ambiguous. She was religious and he can love her now she's 'dead and gone'.
But something of her goes with him, nonetheless, as he travels south, seeing a last helicopter above the Mournes mountains, showers and rainbows through Louth, ivy-and-rhododendron-covered cottages,
ranch houses, 'blue skies of the republic'. The last phrase implies to me that life could be better in the republic than in the North.
'Death in Bangor' is written by a Northern Irish Protestant, totally without bias, so that 'I feel the hand of history on my shoulder' when I read 'blue skies of the republic'.