WEBVTT

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The second of these
portraits is of Dick King.

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Dick King was a friend of our
family when I was very small.

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And he had been born and
raised in a part of Ireland,

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in County Galway, a village
called the Claddagh, which

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at the time when he was born
there was Irish speaking.

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It is no longer.

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And when he was quite
young he moved to Dublin

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and spent a life there
of hard work and poverty

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and toil and privation
of one kind and another.

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When I was growing up, he was to
me an extremely impressive man

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for many reasons, none
of which, I think,

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I understood at the
time, but some of which,

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I think I may understand now.

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And they have to do
mainly with the fact

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that he was an exile in his own
country; the loss of language,

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loss of roots, and so on.

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But yet, a person of
immense innate dignity.

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This poem is the
survival of two poems.

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I attempted to write a
meditative, investigative,

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and analytical poem, and a
simpler, more ballad type form

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celebrating the
memory of Dick King.

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And they finally fused
together into this poem,

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which you will hear, I'm sure,
change gear in the middle.

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In your ghost, Dick King,
in your phantom vowels

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I read that death roves
our memories igniting love.

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Kind plague, low voice
in a stubbed throat,

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you haunt with the taint of
age and of vanished good,

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fouling my thought with losses.

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Clearly now I remember rain
on the cobbles, ripples

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in the iron trough,
and the horses' dipped

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faces under the fountain
in James's Street, when

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I sheltered my nine years
against your buttons

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and your own dread
years were to come;

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And your voice, in a pause
of softness, named the dead,

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hushed as though the city
had died by fire, bemused...

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discovering, discovering
a gate to enter temperate

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ghosthood by; And I
squeezed your fingers

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till you found again my
hand hidden in yours.

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I squeeze your fingers.

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Dick King was an upright man.

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Sixty years he trod the
dull stations underfoot.

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Fifteen he lies with God.

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By the salt seaboard he
increased, by the salt seaboard

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he grew up but left its rock and
rain to bring a dying language

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East and dwell in Basin Lane.

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By the Southern
Railway he increased,

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his second soul was born in
the clanger of the Iron sheds,

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the hush of the late horn.

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And in the lead he took to
wife, she prayed her life away,

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her whisper filled
the whitewashed yard

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until her dying day and
season in, season out he

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made his wintry bed.

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He took the path
to the turnstile

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morning and night until he was.

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Dead.

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He clasped his hands in a union
ward to hear St James's bell,

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I searched his eyes,
though I was young,

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the last to wish him well.

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[APPLAUSE]

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