The second of these portraits is of Dick King.
Dick King was a friend of our family when I was very small.
And he had been born and raised in a part of Ireland,
in County Galway, a village called the Claddagh, which
at the time when he was born there was Irish speaking.
It is no longer.
And when he was quite young he moved to Dublin
and spent a life there of hard work and poverty
and toil and privation of one kind and another.
When I was growing up, he was to me an extremely impressive man
for many reasons, none of which, I think,
I understood at the time, but some of which,
I think I may understand now.
And they have to do mainly with the fact
that he was an exile in his own country; the loss of language,
loss of roots, and so on.
But yet, a person of immense innate dignity.
This poem is the survival of two poems.
I attempted to write a meditative, investigative,
and analytical poem, and a simpler, more ballad type form
celebrating the memory of Dick King.
And they finally fused together into this poem,
which you will hear, I'm sure, change gear in the middle.
In your ghost, Dick King, in your phantom vowels
I read that death roves our memories igniting love.
Kind plague, low voice in a stubbed throat,
you haunt with the taint of age and of vanished good,
fouling my thought with losses.
Clearly now I remember rain on the cobbles, ripples
in the iron trough, and the horses' dipped
faces under the fountain in James's Street, when
I sheltered my nine years against your buttons
and your own dread years were to come;
And your voice, in a pause of softness, named the dead,
hushed as though the city had died by fire, bemused...
discovering, discovering a gate to enter temperate
ghosthood by; And I squeezed your fingers
till you found again my hand hidden in yours.
I squeeze your fingers.
Dick King was an upright man.
Sixty years he trod the dull stations underfoot.
Fifteen he lies with God.
By the salt seaboard he increased, by the salt seaboard
he grew up but left its rock and rain to bring a dying language
East and dwell in Basin Lane.
By the Southern Railway he increased,
his second soul was born in the clanger of the Iron sheds,
the hush of the late horn.
And in the lead he took to wife, she prayed her life away,
her whisper filled the whitewashed yard
until her dying day and season in, season out he
made his wintry bed.
He took the path to the turnstile
morning and night until he was.
Dead.
He clasped his hands in a union ward to hear St James's bell,
I searched his eyes, though I was young,
the last to wish him well.
[APPLAUSE]