My mother took me to speech therapy there. She died when I was ten. Many of my last memories of her are of us sitting in the waiting room there, before my lessons. She worried greatly about me. The speech therapist told her that, behind my speech problems, I was “a bright penny”, but my mother never lived to see any proof of that.
As I stood there, almost thirty years later, watching another mother and child leave the same building, I wrote the first draft of this poem on an old piece of paper I found lying on the roadway.
TEMPLE STREET CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL
I
This is your territory, I brought you here:
Shoddy tenement windows where washing flaps,
Crumbling lanes where cars get broken for parts.
There is an archway beneath which we passed –
Like the one above which you shared a flat
With your sisters up from Monaghan for work
In a war-becalmed Dublin. Surely you must once
Have gazed up, puzzled by how the years since
Had landed you here with a son, a stuttering misfit,
Unable to say the most simple of words,
A bright penny whose cloud you’d never see lift
As you fretted, unaware of how close death hovered.
The speech therapist’s office had fancy toys and books
And a special mirror which allowed me to be watched.
The waiting room contained a large white clock
Which ticked off the final hours we spent alone,
Gazing down at a garden where I longed to walk,
Trapped indoors by the shame of my garbled tongue.
II
I stand outside that hospital in Nerney’s Court,
At Kelly’s Row where a blacksmith once worked,
And no logic can explain why you feel this close,
Why I see us in the mother and child who pass,
Or how, as I age, I slowly become your son,
Gazing through your eyes with incomprehension.
I was too young to have known you, so it makes no sense
That every passing year only deepens your absence.
Some years ago a very old friend of mine told me how her son, after his death, seemed able to send her various messages that he was OK, and that it was time to let go. This very short poem is about the same thing.
WISHBONE
Do not be afraid, my oldest friend,
To send a sign that you are gone:
In the sadness after your funeral
Visit me unexpectedly some morning,
Your face behind mine in a mirror
Glimpsed for an instant, startling young.
From being a son myself and writing about that, I now find myself a father. People think that a poet will be so moved by the birth of his or her children that they will write a poem on the spot.
But, like any parent, I was too engaged in the here-and-now wonder and sheer work of having a new-born child to have time to mark it in verse.
It was only later, doing quite ordinary things, that the magic of being a father worked its way into my poems. This is one of three poems that I wrote for my sons. They mark simple things that their mother and I do with them, like collecting chestnuts or, in this case, just walking in the park.
Being with a young child you see everything through new eyes, filled with the wonder they have in discovering the world.
WALKING IN SPRING WITH MY SONS
Let me search for tractors and motorbikes,
Let the evening be bewitched with promise,
The man who chains the gates of the park
A distant sandman not to be glimpsed yet.
And let me share your eyes as we look
For birds nesting in sycamore and ash;
Let your fingers nestle in my palms
As you point in wonder at trailers and trucks,
And we stride with such tremendous purpose
After our shadows stretching along the path.
Like most Dublin boys I began playing football on the street at the age of five. Now, thirty-five years later, my ankles may be clapped out, my back wrecked and a snail could overtake me, but I still find myself playing every Friday night.
This poem was written on the eve of my fortieth birthday, a cold night of heavy rain when all the young men who play never showed up. The older lads did however; knowing that they should have stopped playing years ago and soon will have to. But for now they were still determined to enjoy every last minute of every last game.
APPROACHING FORTY
The young men fall off on nights like this:
Nobody shows at first in the teeming hail
As floodlights illuminate the vacant pitch.
Slowly a handful of cars start to show.
Drivers stare out at the January gale.
Then exchange looks through their windows.
Nobody in their right mind would play football
On a night when not even dogs would stir,
But a car door opens and slagging voices call.
Men clamber out with strapped ankles and bad backs
To stretch, warm up, laugh at the downpour,
Knowing they won’t always enjoy Fridays like that.
OPEN DOOR SERIES
Sad Song by Vincent Banville
In High Germany by Dermot Bolger
Not Just for Christmas by Roddy Doyle
Maggie’s Story by Sheila O’Flanagan
Jesus and Billy Are Off to Barcelona
by Deirdre Purcell
Ripples by Patricia Scanlan
In High Germany Page 4