Roscommon Childhood

Roscommon, and the memories of a happy childhood there, in a poem that starts off realistically but ends with a skyscape transposed to earth. The child's imagination makes the place a Paradise at the close.


Frosty Morning From My Parents Bedroom

The music box plays
my mother’s glass-topped
mahogany
dressing table;

the frost-petalled
window
with a peep hole
for my blue eye;

a hedge of brittle
looping briars,
Curley’s field a flood
of sugary brilliance;

the beeches,
their heads in the stratosphere;
a barbed-wire fence
staggering between them;

abbey ruins,
a spire and steeple:
Roscommon town
cocooned beside

an ocean of duck egg blue
that rolls into a bay
beneath snowy mountains
a million miles away.