Poetry Ireland Forum - PIR 98

Incertus - a shy and noble digger with pen gazing out from the gable end of the house, a wooden-framed zinc-roofed job, open at one end, the other walls made from flattened out tar barrels. Old tar barrels, for some reason, were in plentiful supply.

A car on a front scrag of grass, ovally border of, I would say, 35 to 40 soft red house bricks, several seven by four glazed ceramics, paler, more yellowy and arranged around a tatty scrap of forlorn and threadbare green. Not hapahazadly, but with the casual placing of an all day builder whose family site was as much ongoing extension and job in progress as home and hearth....

..renovated soon after that by the new owners, although the basic shape of the dwelling house was retained and is still there. The beech trees were cut down, the outbuildings greatly extended - if you see the place now it's completely different, looks like a small industrial estate. Hedges between the field have been taken out, the railway has gone, and in general - not just round...

..our way, as we called it when children. It must have been when aunt Roxy moved in with us after her husband, uncle Merlon had been taken into hospital in the spring of 1977. We'd already moved into the new house from Dun Roamin, several miles south east of Dun Roamin II, which Father had won in a game of strip dominos, beating a team of barmaids from the Cock pub and several, I think, local refuse collectors in there for the adult performers. It's true..

Without the scholarship system inaugrated at the time, I don't think I'd ever have got to university. The teachers at primary school told my parents I was a clever boy...as Yeats calls it, the soul of birth seperated from its other half, and seeking and yearning for it ever after. When I recollect myself as a young child, I have a sense of being close to that unsatisfied, desiring, lonely inner core. It - or he - hasn't disappeared but nowadays, he dwells farther in..