You need to use precise quotation in your Leaving Cert Poetry essay
Choose the lines you like best from the ones in bold. Have four quotations per poem, minimum. More on how many quotations to learn and how many to put in your Leaving Cert essay.
Complete Guide: A1 Leaving Cert English Notes and Sample Answers (€)
Paul Durcan’s poems with selected quotations
Nessa
I met her on the First of August
In the Shangri-La Hotel,
She took me by the index finger
And dropped me in her well.
And that was a whirlpool, that was a whirlpool,
And I very nearly drowned.
Take off your pants, she said to me,
And I very nearly didn’t;
Would you care to swim? she said to me,
And I hopped into the Irish Sea.
And that was a whirlpool, that was a whirlpool,
And I very nearly drowned.
On the way back I fell in the field
And she fell down beside me.
I’d have lain in the grass with her all my life
With Nessa:
She was a whirlpool, she was a whirlpool,
And I very nearly drowned.
Oh Nessa my dear, Nessa my dear,
Will you stay with me on the rocks?
Will you come for me into the Irish Sea
And for me let your red hair down?
And then we will ride into Dublin City
In a taxi-cab wrapped-up in dust.
Oh you are a whirlpool, you are a whirlpool,
And I am very nearly drowned.
The Girl with the Keys to Pearse’s Cottage
When I was sixteen I met a dark girl;
Her dark hair was darker because her smile was so bright;
She was the girl with the keys to Pearse’s Cottage;
And her name was Cáit Killann.
The cottage was built into the side of a hill;
I recall two windows and a cosmic peace
Of bare brown rooms and on whitewashed walls
Photographs of the passionate and pale Pearse.
I recall wet thatch and peeling jambs
And how all was best seen from below in the field;
I used to sit in the rushes with ledger-book and pencil
Compiling poems of passion for Cáit Killann.
Often she used linger on the sill of a window;
Hands by her side and brown legs akimbo;
In sun-red skirt and moon-black blazer;
Looking toward our strange world wide-eyed.
Our world was strange because it had no future;
She was America-bound at summer’s end.
She had no choice but to leave her home –
The girl with the keys to Pearse’s Cottage.
O Cáit Killann, O Cáit Killann,
You have gone with your keys from your own native place.
Yet here in this dark – El Greco eyes blaze back
From your Connemara postman’s daughter’s proudly mortal face.
Wife Who Smashed Television Gets Jail
“She came home, my Lord, and smashed in the television;
Me and the kids were peaceably watching Kojak
When she marched into the living room and declared
That if I didn’t turn off the television immediately
She’d put her boot through the screen;
I didn’t turn it off, so instead she turned it off –
I remember the moment exactly because Kojak
After shooting a dame with the same name as my wife
Snarled at the corpse – Goodnight, Queen Maeve –
And then she took off her boots and smashed in the television;
I had to bring the kids round to my mother’s place;
We got there just before the finish of Kojak;
(My mother has a fondness for Kojak, my Lord);
When I returned home my wife had deposited
What was left of the television into the dustbin,
Saying – I didn’t get married to a television
And I don’t see why my kids or anybody else’s kids
Should have a television for a father or mother,
We’d be much better off all down in the pub talking
Or playing bar-billiards –
Whereupon she disappeared off back down again to the pub.”
Justice O’Brádaigh said wives who preferred bar-billiards to
family television
Were a threat to the family which was the basic unit of society
As indeed the television itself could be said to be a basic unit of
the family
And when as in this case wives expressed their preference in
forms of violence
Jail was the only place for them. Leave to appeal was refused.
En Famille, 1979
To where tiny is tiny, and massive is massive.
Madman
‘Windfall’, 8 Parnell Hill, Cork
Well, now, I am going home.
I felt elected, steeped, sovereign to be able to say –
I am going home.
When I was at home I liked to stay at home;
At home I stayed at home for weeks;
At home I used sit in a winged chair by the window
Overlooking the river and the factory chimneys,
The electricity power station and the car assembly works,
The fleets of trawlers and the pilot tugs,
Dreaming that life is a dream which is real,
The river a reflection of itself in its own waters,
Goya sketching Goya among the smokey mirrors.
The industrial vista was my Mont Sainte-Victoire.
While my children sat on my knees watching TV
Their mother, my wife, reclined on the couch
Knitting a bright-coloured scarf, drinking a cup of black coffee,
Smoking a cigarette – one of her own roll-ups.
I closed my eyes and breathed in and breathed out.
It is ecstacy to breathe if you are at home in the world.
What a windfall! A home of our own!
Our neighbours’ houses had names like ‘Con Amore’,
‘Sans Souci’, ‘Pacelli’, ‘Montini’, ‘Homesville’.
But we called our home ‘Windfall’.
‘Windfall’, 8 Parnell Hill, Cork.
In the gut of my head coursed the leaf of tranquility
Which I dreamed was known only to Buddhist Monks
In lotus monasteries high up in the Hindu Kush.
Down here in the dark depths of Ireland,
Below sea level in the city of Cork,
In a city as intimate and homicidal as Little Marseilles,
In a country where all children of the nation
Are not cherished equally
And where the best go homeless, while the worst
Erect block-house palaces – self-regardingly ugly –
Having a home of your own can give to a family
A chance in a lifetime to transcend death.
At the high window, shipping from all over the world
Being borne up and down the busy, yet contemplative, river;
Skylines drifting in and out of skylines in the cloudy valley;
Firelight at dusk, and city lights;
Beyond them the control tower of the airport on the hill –
A lighthouse in the sky flashing green to white to green;
Our black-and-white cat snoozing in the corner of a chair;
Pastels and etchings on the four walls, and over the mantelpiece
‘Van Gogh’s Grave’ and ‘Lovers in Water’;
A room wallpapered in books and family photograph albums
Chronicling the adventures and metamorphoses of family life:
In swaddling clothes in Mammy’s arms on baptism day;
Being a baby of nine months and not remembering it;
Face-down in a pram, incarcerated in a high chair;
Everybody, including strangers, wearing shop-window smiles;
With Granny in Felixstowe, with Granny in Ballymaloe;
In a group photo in First Infants, on a bike at thirteen;
In the back garden in London, in the back garden in Cork;
Performing a headstand after First Holy Communion;
Getting a kiss from the Bishop on Confirmation Day;
Straw hats in the Bois de Boulougne, wearing wings at the seaside;
Mammy and Daddy holding hands on the Normandy Beaches;
Mammy and Daddy at the wedding of Jeremiah and Margot;
Mammy and Daddy queueing up for Last Tango in Paris;
Boating on the Shannon, climbing mountains in Kerry;
Building sandcastles in Killala, camping in Barley Cove;
Picknicking in Moone, hide-and-go-seek in Clonmacnoise;
Riding horses, cantering, jumping fences;
Pushing out toy yachts in the pond in the Tuileries;
The Irish College revisited in the Rue des Irlandais;
Sipping on an orangé presse through a straw on the roof of the Beaubourg;
Dancing in Pere Lachaise, weeping at Auvers.
Year in, year out, I pored over these albums accumulating,
My children looking over my shoulder, exhilarated as I was,
Their mother presiding at out ritual from a distance –
The far side of the hearthrug, diffidently, proudly.
Schoolbooks on the floor and pyjamas on the couch –
Whose turn is it tonight to put the children to bed?
Our children swam about our home
As if it were their private sea,
Their own unique, symbiotic fluid
Of which their parents also partook.
Such is home – a sea of your own –
In which you hang upside down from the ceiling
With equanimity, while postcards from Thailand on the mantelpiece
Are raising their eyebrow markings benignly:
Your hands dangling their prayers to the floorboards of your home,
Sifting the sands underneath the surfaces of conversations.
The marine insect life of the family psyche.
A home of your own – or a sea of your own –
In which climbing the walls is as natural
As making love on the stairs;
In which when the telephone rings
Husband and wife are metamorphosed into smiling accomplices,
Both declining to answer it;
Initiating, instead, a yet more subversive kiss –
A kiss they have perhaps never attempted before –
And might never have dreamed of attempting
Were it not for the telephone belling.
Through the bannisters or along the bannister rails
The pyjama-clad children solemnly watching
Their parents at play, jumping up and down in support,
Race back to bed, gesticulating wordlessly:
The most subversive unit in society is the human family.
We’re almost home, pet, almost home…
Our home is at…
I’ll be home…
I have to go home now…
I want to go home now…
Are you feeling homesick?
Are you anxious to get home?…
I can’t wait to get home…
Let’s stay at home to tonight and…
What time will you be coming home at?…
If I’m not home by six at the latest, I’ll phone…
We’re nearly home, don’t worry, we’re nearly home…
But then with good reason
I was put out of my home:
By a keen wind felled.
I find myself now without a home
Having to live homeless in the alien, foreign city of Dublin.
It is an eerie enough feeling to be homesick
Yet knowing you will be going home next week;
It is an eerie feeling beyond all ornithological analysis
To be homesick knowing that there is no home to go to:
Day by day, creeping, crawling,
Moonlighting, escaping,
Bed-and-breakfast to bed-and-breakfast;
Hostels, centres, one-night hotels.
Homeless in Dublin,
Blown about the suburban streets at evening,
Peering in the windows of other people’s homes,
Wondering what it must feel like
To be sitting around a fire –
Apache or Cherokee or Bourgeoisie –
Beholding the firelit faces of your family,
Beholding their starry or their TV gaze:
Windfall to Windfall – can you hear me?
Windfall to Windfall…
We’re almost home, pet, don’t worry anymore, we’re almost home.
Sport
There were not many fields
In which you had hopes for me
But sport was one of them.
On my twenty-first birthday
I was selected to play
For Grangegorman Mental Hospital
In an away game
Against Mullingar Mental Hospital.
I was a patient
In B Wing.
You drove all the way down,
Fifty miles,
To Mullingar to stand
On the sidelines and observe me.
I was fearful I would let down
Not only my team but you.
It was Gaelic football.
I was selected as goalkeeper.
There were big country men
On the Mullingar Mental Hospital team,
Men with gapped teeth, red faces,
Oily, frizzy hair, bushy eyebrows.Their full forward line
Were over six foot tall
Fifteen stone in weight.
All three of them, I was informed,
Cases of schizophrenia.
There was a rumour
That their centre-half forward
Was an alcoholic solicitor
Who, in a lounge bar misunderstanding,
Had castrated his best friendBut that he had no memory of it.
He had meant well – it was said.
His best friend had to emigrate
To Nigeria.
To my surprise,
I did not flinch in the goals.
I made three or four spectacular saves,
Diving full stretch to turn
A certain goal around the corner,
Leaping high to tip another certain goal
Over the bar for a point.
It was my knowing
That you were standing on the sideline
That gave me the necessary motivation
That will to die
That is as essential to sportsmen as to artists.
More than anybody it was you
I wanted to mesmerise, and after the game –
Grangegorman Mental Hospital
Having defeated Mullingar Mental Hospital
By 14 Goals and 38 points to 3 goals and 10 points –
Sniffing your approval, you shook hands with me.
‘Well played, son’.
I may not have been mesmeric
But I had not been mediocre.
In your eyes I had achieved something at last.
On my twenty-first birthday
I had played on a winning team
The Grangegorman Mental Hospital team.
Seldom if ever again in your eyes
Was I to rise to these heights.
Rosie Joyce
That was that Sunday afternoon in May
When a hot sun pushed through the clouds
And you were born!
I was driving the two hundred miles from west to east,
The sky blue-and-white china in the fields
In impromptu picnics of tartan rugs;
When neither words nor I
Could have known that you had been named already
And that your name was Rosie –
Rosie Joyce! May you some day in May
Fifty-six years from today be as lucky
As I was when you were born that Sunday:
To drive such side-roads, such main roads, such ramps, such
roundabouts,
To cross such bridges, to by-pass such villages, such towns
As I did on your Incarnation Day.
By-passing Swinford – Croagh Patrick in my rear-view mirror –
My cell phone rang and, stopping on the hard edge of P. Flynn’s highway,
I heard Mark your father say:
“A baby girl was born at 3.33 p.m.
Weighing 7 and a I/2 Ibs in Holles Street.
Tough work, all well.”
That Sunday in May before daybreak
Night had pushed up through the slopes of Achill
Yellow forefingers of Arum Lily – the first of the year;
Down at the Sound the first rhododendrons
Purpling the golden camps of whins;
The first hawthorns powdering white the mainland;
The first yellow irises flagging roadside streams;
Quills of bog-cotton skimming the bogs;
Burrishoole cemetery shin-deep in forget-me-nots;
The first sea pinks speckling the seashore;
Cliffs of London Pride, groves of bluebell,
First fuchsia, Queen Anne’s Lace, primrose.
I drove the Old Turlough Road, past Walter Durcan’s Farm,
Umbrella’d in the joined handwriting of its ash trees;
I drove Tulsk, Kilmainham, the Grand Canal.
Never before had I felt so fortunate.
To be driving back into Dublin city;
Each canal bridge an old pewter brooch.
I rode the waters and the roads of Ireland,
Rosie, to be with you, seashell at my ear!
How I laughed when I cradled you in my hand.
Only at Tarmonbarry did I slow down,
As in my father’s Ford Anglia half a century ago
He slowed down also, as across the River Shannon
We crashed, rattled and bounced on a Bailey bridge;
Daddy relishing his role as Moses,
Enunciating the name of the Great Divide
Between the East and the West!
We are the people of the West,
Our fate to go East.
No such thing, Rosie, as a Uniform Ireland
And please God there never will be;
There is only the River Shannon and all her sister rivers
And all her brother mountains and their family prospects.
There are higher powers than politics
And these we call wildflowers or, geologically, people.
Rossie Joyce – that Sunday in May
Not alone did you make my day, my week, my year
To the prescription of Jonathan Philbin Bowman –
Daymaker!
Daymaker!
Daymaker!
Popping out of my daughter, your mother –
Changing the expressions on the faces all around you –
All of them looking like blue hills in a heat haze –
But you saved my life. For three years
I had been subsisting in the slums of despair,
Unable to distinguish one day from the next.
On the return journey from Dublin to Mayo
In Charlestown on Main Street
I meet John Normanly, organic farmer from Curry.
He is driving home to his wife Caroline
From a Mountbellew meeting of the Western Development
Commission
Of Dillon House in Ballaghadereen.
He crouches in his car, I waver in the street,
As we exchange lullabies of expectancy;
We wet our foreheads in John Moriarty’s autobiography.
The following Sunday is the Feast of the Ascension
Of Our Lord into Heaven:
Thank You, O Lord, for the Descent of Rosie onto Earth.
On the east side of a public gardens, St. Stephen’s Green.
Grafton Street – the paseo
Where everybody paseo’d, including even ourselves –
Debouched on the north side, and at the top of Grafton Street,
Or round the base of the great patriotic pebble of O’Donovan Rossa,
Knelt tableaus of punk girls and punk boys.
When I used to pass them – scurrying as I went –
Often as not to catch a mass in Clarendon Street,
The Carmelite Church in Clarendon Street
(Myself, I never used the Clarendon Street entrance,
Opposite the side entrance to Bewley’s Oriental Cafe),
I could not help but smile, as I sucked on a Fox’s mint,
That for all the half-shaven heads and the martial garb
And the dyed hair-dos and the nappy pins
They looked so conventional, really, and vulnerable,
Clinging to war paint and to uniforms and to one another.
I knew it was myself who was the ultimate drop-out,
The delinquent, the recidivist, the vagabond,
The wild woman, the subversive, the original punk.
Yet, although I confess I was smiling, I was also afraid,
Appalled by my own nerve, my own fervour,
My apocalyptic enthusiasm, my other-worldly hubris2:
To opt out of the world and to
Choose such exotic loneliness,
Such terrestrial abandonment,
A lifetime of bicycle lamps and bicycle pumps,
A lifetime of galoshes stowed under the stairs,
A lifetime of umbrellas drying out in the kitchens.
But I was no daw.
I knew what a weird bird I was, I knew that when we
Went to bed we were as eerie an aviary1 as you’d find
In all the blown-off rooftops of the city:
Scuttling about our dorm, wheezing, shrieking, croaking,
In our yellowy corsets, wonky suspenders, strung-out garters,
A bony brew in the gods of the sleeping city.
Many’s the night I lay awake in bed
Dreaming what would befall us if there were a fire:
No fire-escapes outside, no fire-extinguishers inside;
To coin a Dublin saying,
We’d not stand a snowball’s chance in hell. Fancy that!
It seemed too good to be true:
Happy death vouchsafed2 only to the few.
Sleeping up there was like sleeping at the top of the mast
Of a nineteenth-century schooner, and in the daytime
We old nuns were the ones who crawled out on the yardarms
To stitch and sew the rigging and the canvas.
To be sure we were weird birds, oddballs, Christniks,
For we had done the weirdest thing a woman can do –
Surrendered the marvellous passions of girlhood
The innocent dreams of childhood,
Not for a night or a weekend or even a Lent or a season,
But for a lifetime.
Never to know the love of a man or a woman;
Never to have children of our own;
Never to have a home of our own;
All for why and for what?
To follow a young man – would you believe it –
Who lived two thousand years ago in Palestine
And who died a common criminal strung up on a tree.
Burning to death in the arms of Christ –
O Christ, Christ, come quickly, quickly –
Fluttering about in our tight, gold bodices,
Beating our wings in vain,
It reminded me of the snaps one of the sisters took
When we took a seaside holiday in 1956
(The year Cardinal Mindszenty went into hiding
In the US legation in Budapest.
He was a great hero of ours, Cardinal Mindszenty,
And any of us would have given our right arm
To have been his nun – darning his socks, cooking his meals,
Making his bed, doing his washing and ironing).
Somebody – an affluent buddy of the bishop’s repenting his affluence –
Loaned Mother Superior a secluded beach in Co. Waterford –
Ardmore, along the coast from Tramore –
A cove with palm trees, no less, well off the main road.
There we were, fluttering up and down the beach,
Scampering hither and thither in our starched bathing-costumes.
Tonight, expiring in the fire, was quite much like that,
Only instead of scampering into the waves of the sea,
Now we were scampering into the flames of the fire.
The day the sisters went swimming.
Often in the silent darkness of the chapel after Benediction,
During the Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament,
I glimpsed the sea again as it was that day.
Praying – daydreaming really –
I became aware that Christ is the ocean
Forever rising and falling on the world’s shore.
Now tonight in the convent Christ is the fire in whose waves
We are doomed but delighted to drown.
And, darting in and out of the flames of the dormitory,
Gabriel, with that extraordinary message of his on his boyish lips,
Frenetically pedalling his skybike.
He whispers into my ear what I must do
And I do it – and die.
Each of us in our own tiny, frail, furtive way
Was a Mother of God, mothering forth illegitimate Christs
In the street life of Dublin city.
God have mercy on our whirring souls –
Wild women were we all –
And on the misfortunate, poor fire-brigade men
Whose task it will be to shovel up our ashes and shovel
What is left of us into black plastic refuse sacks.
Fire-brigade men are the salt of the earth.
When you least expect it? When you lose a thing,
Not to know about it until it actually happens?
How, in so many ways, losing things is such a refreshing experience,
Giving you a sense of freedom you’ve not often experienced?
How lucky I was to lose – I say, lose – lose my life.
It was a Sunday night, and after vespers
I skipped bathroom so that I could hop straight into bed
And get a bit of a read before lights out:
Conor Cruise O’Brien’s new book The Siege,
All about Israel and superlatively insightful
For a man who they say is reputedly an agnostic –
I got a loan of it from the brother-in-law’s married niece –
But I was tired out and I fell asleep with the book open
Face down across my breast and I woke
To the racket of bellowing flame and snarling glass.
The first thing I thought was that the brother-in-law’s married niece
Would never again get her Conor Cruise O’Brien back
And I had seen on the price-tag that it cost £23.00:
Small wonder that the custom of snipping off the price
As an exercise in social deportment has simply died out;
Indeed a book today is almost worth buying for its price,
Its price frequently being more remarkable than its contents.
To be eaten alive by fire and smoke.
I clasped the dragon to my breast
And stroked his red-hot ears.
Strange! There we were, all sleeping molecules,
Suddenly all giving birth to our deaths,
All frantically in labour.
Doctors and midwives weaved in and out
In gowns of smoke and gloves of fire.
Christ, like an Orthodox patriarch in his dressing-gown,
Flew up and down the dormitory, splashing water on our souls:
Sister Eucharia; Sister Seraphia; Sister Rosario;
Sister Gonzago; Sister Margaret; Sister Edith.
If you will remember us – six nuns burnt to death –
Remember us for the frisky girls that were,
Now more than ever kittens in the sun.
Uttered by a small, aged, emaciated, female punk
Clad all in mourning black, and grieving like an alley cat,
He was annulled with astonishment, and turning round
He declared to the gangs of teenagers and dicemen following him:
“I tell you, not even in New York City
Have I found faith like this.”
That night in St Stephen’s Green,
After the keepers had locked the gates,
And the courting couples had found cinemas themselves to die in,
The six nuns who had died in the convent inferno,
From the bandstand they’d been hiding under, crept out
And knelt together by the Fountain of the Three Fates,
Reciting the Agnus Dei: reciting it as if it were the torch song
Of all aid – Live Aid, Self Aid, Aids, and All Aid –
Lord, I am not worthy
That thou should’st enter under my roof;
Say but the word and my soul shall be healed.
The MacBride Dynasty
Spitting dynastic as well as motherly pride?
In 1949 in the black Ford Anglia,
Now that I had become a walking, talking little boy,
Mummy drove me out to visit my grand-aunt Maud Gonne
In Roebuck House in the countryside near Dublin,
To show off to the servant of the Queen
The latest addition to the extended family.
Although the eighty-year-old Cathleen Ní Houlihan had taken to her bed
She was keen as ever to receive admirers,
Especially the children of the family.
Only the previous week the actor MacLiammóur
Had been kneeling at her bedside reciting Yeats to her,
His hand on her heart, clutching a red rose.
Cousin Sean and his wife Kid led the way up the stairs,
Sean opening the door and announcing my mother.
Mummy lifted me up in her arms as she approached the bed
And Maud leaned forward, sticking out her claws
To embrace me, her lizards of eyes darting about
In the rubble of the ruins of her beautiful place.
Terrified, I recoiled from her embrace
And, fleeing her bedroom, ran down the stairs
Out onto the wrought-iron balcony
Until Sean caught up with me and quieted me
And took me for a walk in the walled orchard
Mummy was a little but not totally mortified:
She had never liked Maud Gonne because of Maud’s
Betrayal of her husband, Mummy’s Uncle John,
Mayor John, most ordinary of men, most
Humorous, courageous of soldiers,
The pride of our family,
Whose memory always brought laughter
To my grandmother Eileen’s lips. ‘John,’
She used to cry, ‘John was such a gay man.’
Mummy set great store by loyalty; loyalty
In Mummy’s eyes was the cardinal virtue.
Maud Gonne was a disloyal wife
And, therefore, was not worthy of Mummy’s love.
For dynastic reasons we would tolerate Maud,
But we would always see through her.
The Difficulty that is Marriage
And you are faraway curled up in sleep
I array the moonlit ceiling with a mosaic of question marks;
How was it I was so lucky to have ever met you?
I am no brave pagan proud of my mortality
Yet gladly on this changeling earth I should live for ever
If it were with you, my sleeping friend.
I have my troubles and I shall always have them
But I should rather live with you for ever
Than exchange my troubles for a changeless kingdom.
But I do not put you on a pedestal or throne;
You must have your faults but I do not see them.
If it were with you, I should live for ever.
Ireland 2002
No, we always go to America.
The Arnolfini Marriage
Do not think you may invade
Our privacy because you may not.
The most erotic portrait ever made,
Because we have faith in the artist
Fertility, domesticity, barefootedness
Of a man and a woman saying “we”:
As being our most necessary furniture;
To do justice to our life as a reflection.
And the terrier at our feet sniffs
The minutiae of our magnitude.
Imagine being able to say “we”.
Most people are in no position to say “we”.
With an Alsatian shepherd dog tied to your handlebars?
We will pause not for the Angelus.Here you have it:
The two halves of the coconut.
Father’s Day, 21 June 1992
Dashing up and down the stairs, searching my pockets,
She told me that her sister in Cork wanted a loan of the axe;
It was late June and
The buddleia tree in the backyard
Had grown out of control.
The taxi was ticking over outside in the street,
All the neighbours noticing it.
“You mean that you want me to bring her down the axe?”
“Yes, if you wouldn’t mind, that is—”
“A simple saw would do the job, surely to God
She could borrow a simple saw.”
“She said that she’d like the axe.”
“OK. There is a Blue Cabs taxi ticking over outside
And the whole world is inspecting it,
I’ll being her town the axe.”
The axe – all four-and-a-half feet of it –
Was leaning up against the wall behind the settee –
The fold-up settee that doubles as a bed.
She handed the axe to me just as it was,
As neat as a newborn babe,
All in the bare buff.You’d think she’d have swaddled it up
In something – if not a blanket, an old newspaper,
But no, not even a token hanky
Tied in a bow round its head.
I decided not to argue the toss. I kissed her goodbye.
I felt uneasy. Guilt feelings.
It’s a killer, this guilt.I always feel bad leaving her
But this time it was the worse.
I could see that she was glad
To see me go away for a while,
Glad at the prospect of being
Two weeks on her own,
Two weeks of having the bed to herself,
Two weeks of not having to be pestered
By my coarse advances,
Two weeks of not having to look up from her plate
And behold me eating spaghetti with a knife and fork.
Our daughters are all grown up and gone away.
Once when she was sitting pregnant and on the settee
It snapped shut with herself inside it,
But not a bother on her. I nearly died.
As the train slowed down approaching Portarlington
I overheard myself say to the passenger sitting opposite me:
“I am feeling guilty because she does not love me
As much as she used to, can you explain that?”
The passenger’s eyes were on the axe on the seat beside me.
“Her sister wants a loan of the axe…”
As the train threaded itself into Portarlington
I nodded to the passenger “Cúl an tSúdaire!”
The passenger stood up, lifted down a case from the rack,
Walked out of the coach, but did not get off the train.
For the remainder of the journey, we sat alone,
The axe and I,
All the green fields running away from us,
All out daughters grown up and gone away.
Parents
A child’s face is a drowned face:
Her parents stare down at her asleep
Estranged from her by a sea:
She is under the sea
And they are above the sea:
If she looked up she would see them
As if locked out of their own home,
Their mouths open,
Their foreheads furrowed –
Pursed-up orifices of fearful fish –
Their big ears are fins behind glass
And in her sleep she is calling out to them
Father, Father
Mother, Mother
But they cannot hear her:
She is inside the sea
And they are outside the sea.
Through the night, stranded, they stare
At the drowned, drowned face of their child.
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Leaving Cert English Sample Essay and Notes
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