From a Child's Bedroom Window

A small child with a view of countryside from his or her bedroom window has a million miles of darkness for imagination to roam through after darkness falls. Heaven and earth merge in the blackness;so the realms of spirit and man become one.


The Boy Who Watched For Apparitions.


Goodnight to the twin moons
stretched along the railway tracks
outside Roscommon.
My night-time window halved
with those trains rushing across the glass,
strips of film filled with their own lives:
adventurers and bon-vivants,
whose strings of lights recreated as they passed
the grassy slope, the elder bushes,
the buffer with the hole in the side;
strangers oblivious to such little worlds
and to the boy who watched for apparitions
from his bedroom window.
And in a moment they were gone,
leaving the darkness darker and the boy listening,
trying to gauge where the sounds
finally disappeared into the wind.


What lay beyond that window-world ?

The station to the right,
the white gates to the left,
and then..........


Now I remember those film strips
sailing through that pitch emptiness;
sometimes they were only ruffed impressions
when the window was full of pouring rain.
I remember how my imagination filled like a can
when all that was left was the headlight's beam
over the trees of Bully's Acre.
And there is often disappointment in these poems;
the disappointment of that place beyond
where the rhythms of trains were reclaimed by the wind.



......from Sunfire (Dedalus Press)

A Child's Imagination

It doesn't take much. Under a hedge was a tunnel, a tree was a fortress, long grass was crawling with unfriendly natives, wildlife, whatever.


The Fort

When the shed was loaded with turf, Martin and I dug a bunker, mounted hurlies, one to the front, two through the slits in the back wall and spent all afternoon watching for Germans invading from Fahy’s or crawling on their bellies through the long grass behind Glynn’s.

Sometimes we took our rifles onto the roof. Shot, we plummeted to our deaths on the lawn or maybe we parachuted with pillow-cases, before dashing for cover under a hail of enemy fire.

Now and then we came charging, guns blazing, picking off enemy between the gooseberry bushes; occasionally we fired on jets, watched their jet-trails pour smoke into the sky before ditching over the horizon, somewhere beyond Stonepark.

All winter our bunker dwindled, till May saw the shed empty. Good thing too, Geoff Hurst wouldn’t want turf stacked in the back of the Wembley net.
Our shed filled with turf.....