I posted one of my poems on Barstool Blues the other day - about recollections of a weekend romance in Dublin many years ago - which included a reference to a famous statue of the poet Patrick Kavanagh on the bank of the Grand Canal.
I really don't know much about him (other than that he is not to be confused - but often is! - with P. J. Kavanagh, an English writer and broadcaster, and creator of The Oxford Book Of Short Poems, which is one of my very favourite anthologies), and find, on looking into it, that I don't really like much of his stuff. But it seems he's terribly popular with the Irish. Revered, indeed. Oh yes, up there with Yeats. There's no accounting for taste.
Anyway, this one I quite like.
Memory Of My Father
Every old man I see
Reminds me of my father
When he had fallen in love with death
One time when sheaves were gathered.
That man I saw in Gardner Street
Stumbled on the kerb was one,
He stared at me half-eyed,
I might have been his son.
And I remember the musician
Faltering over his fiddle
In Bayswater, London,
He too set me the riddle.
Every old man I see
In October-coloured weather
Seems to say to me:
"I was once your father."
Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967)
1 comment:
I don't "know" Kavanaugh, either.
But I do see the universality of his writings.
Indeed, I often "see" my grandfather in the wrinkled faces of other old men.
I have lost a few dearly loved ones - grandparents, uncles and such (no more than normal for someone of my age) - and sometimes find myself in their city, spotting them out of the corner of my eye - only to take a closer look and realize it is not them at all.
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