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Irish Pages LTD
On the Hospital BusAuthor(s): Gary AllenSource: Irish Pages, Vol. 3, No. 2, The Home Place (2006), pp. 64-66Published by: Irish Pages LTDStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30057416 .
Accessed: 16/06/2014 01:40
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This content downloaded from 185.2.32.121 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 01:40:20 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
IRISH PAGES
always too big for the world.
Ships have sailed and floundered
carefully bevelled handrails and cabinets have rotted on the ocean bed -
brothers and sisters have shed skins as you are unchanged in your infant cries.
Now you wait among the stones,
having carried my grandparents across long ago, for two dull pennies
from the mouth of the child you have never known.
64
ON THE HOSPITAL BUS
Here is an idea, of bare fields without crows
barley or corn,
but the rain, and the wind, and the endless mud furrows to a lone tree that reminds us of something, of the third month,
containing a madness of our own making
like red brick - these Victorian buildings lights on though it is only afternoon
half-moons, stars, suns, of imagination talismans dangling in the locked windows
small round faces not bothering to look out on a world that is no longer there
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IRISH PAGES
as the one we gaze on through smeared glass the shudder of the diesel engine as the bus waits
as the laurel bushes bend
under the weight of water
and the smoke rises steadily from a kitchen flue
to blow back and forth before failing:
it was what they feared most, a faraway hand
that sent a car into their street
a solid thought, like black suits -
they'd turn away a superstition as the crying stranger among them
was taken out, a shame
a seed gone bad -
Lord, keep it from our door.
An aunt was touched by the Gods
vaulted from being a bit odd
to classified insane
a concept her father
couldn't contain within his narrow vision
she frightened us children
by racing around the house weeping, Beware the ides of March -
somehow the words meant so much more
by our ignorance -
then she was gone, forgotten, never spoken of.
65
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IRISH PAGES
Each within our universe of pain, we watch the line straggle to the little stone church -
the perversity of existence:
as the bus pulls out to the roadway, to what we believe is normality
and the fields roll on, the rain hammers the roof, the buildings become a mirage like the hospital buildings in front,
and my aunt wrote only once from there - Look onto me, for there is nothing else.
66
SAFE GROUND
My welcome home was a bearded sailor blue on a gable wall
the open window of the cobbler's shop an uncle gruff with religion
blistered fingertips stained with tannins a mouth of tacks like broken teeth
or marriage vows, illegitimate children
the oil lamp a bright star above a cradle
mundane, beautiful for all that
without sermon, ceremony, or Mass
the squat chapel in darkness, the great Celtic crosses a sleeping race
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