Dawn at St. Patrick's

There is an old

statue in the courtyard

that weeps, like Niobe, its sorrow in stone.

The griefs of the ages she has made her own.

Her eyes are rain-washed but not hard,

her body is covered in mould,

the garden overgrown.

One by one

the first lights come on,

those that haven’t been on all night.

Christmas, the harshly festive, has come and gone.

No snow, but the rain pours down

in the first hour before dawn,

before daylight.

Swift’s home

for ‘fools and mad’ has become

the administrative block. Much there

has remained unchanged for many a long year —

stairs, chairs, Georgian windows shafting light and dust,

of the satirist;

but the real

hospital is a cheerful

modern extension at the back

hung with restful reproductions of Dufy, Klee and Braque.

Television, Russian fiction, snooker with the staff,

a snifter of Lucozade, a paragraph

of Newsweek or the Daily Mail

are my daily routine

during the festive season.

They don’t lock the razors here

as in Bowditch Hall. We have remained upright —

though, to be frank, the Christmas dinner scene,

with grown men in their festive gear,

was a sobering sight.

I watch the last

planes of the year go past,

silently climbing a cloud-lit sky.

Earth-bound, soon I’ll be taking a train to Cork

and trying to get back to work

at my sea-lit, fort-view desk

in the turf-smoky dusk.

Meanwhile,

next door, a visiting priest

intones to a faithful dormitory.

I sit on my Protestant bed, a make-believe existentialist,

and stare the clouds of unknowing. We style,

as best we may, our private destiny;

or so it seems to me

as I chew my thumb

and try to figure out

what brought me to my present state —

an ‘educated man’, a man of consequence, no bum

but one who has hardly grasped what life is about,

if anything. My children, far away,

don’t know where I am today,

in a Dublin asylum

with a paper whistle and a mince pie,

my bits and pieces making a home from home.

I pray to the rain-clouds that they never come

where their lost father lies; that their mother thrives;

and that I

may measure up to them

before I die.

Soon a new year

will be here demanding, as before,

modest proposals, resolute resolutions, a new leaf,

new leaves. This is the story of my life,

the story of all lives everywhere,

mad fools whatever we are,

in here or out there.

Light and sane

I shall walk down to the train,

into that world whose sanity we know,

like Swift to be a fiction and a show.

The clouds part, the rain ceases, the sun

casts now upon everyone

its ancient shadow.

Source: Collected Poems (The Gallery Press, 2008)