A TIMELY MEMORY

A CHRISTMAS CHILDHOOD

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One side of the potato-pits was white with frost—

How wonderful that was, how wonderful!

And when we put our ears to the paling-post

The music that came out was magical.

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The light between the ricks of hay and straw

Was a hole in Heaven's gable.An apple tree

With its December-glinting fruit we saw—

O you, Eve, were the world that tempted me

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To eat the knowledge that grew in clay

And death the germ within it! Now and then

I can remember something of the gay

Garden that was childhood's. Again

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The tracks of cattle to a drinking-place,

A green stone lying sideways in a ditch

Or any common sight the transfigured face

Of a beauty that the world did not touch.

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My father played the melodeon

Outside at our gate;

There were stars in the morning east

And they danced to his music.

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Across the wild bogs his melodeon called

To Lennons and Callans.

As I pulled on my trousers in a hurry

I knew some strange thing had happened.

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Outside the cow-house my mother

Made the music of milking;

The light of her stable-lamp was a star

And the frost of Bethlehem made it twinkle.

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A water-hen screeched in the bog,

Mass-going feet

Crunched the wafer-ice on the pot-holes,

Somebody wistfully twisted the bellows wheel.

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My child poet picked out the letters

On the grey stone,

In silver the wonder of a Christmas townland,

The winking glitter of a frosty dawn.

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Cassiopeia was over

Cassidy's hanging hill,

I looked and three whin* bushes rode across

The horizon — The Three Wise Kings.

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An old man passing said:

'Can't he make it talk'—

The melodeon. I hid in the doorway

And tightened the belt of my box-pleated coat.

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I nicked six nicks on the door-post

With my penknife's big blade—

There was a little one for cutting tobacco,

And I was six Christmases of age.

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My father played the melodeon,

My mother milked the cows,

And I had a prayer like a white rose pinned

On the Virgin Mary's blouse.

Patrick Kavanagh