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A Christmas Childhood
by Patrick Kavanagh
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
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.
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
My father played the melodeon
Outside at our gate;
There were stars in the morning east
And they danced to his music.
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.
A water hen screeched in the bog,
Mass going feet
Crunched the wafer ice on the pot holes,
Somebody wistfully twisted the bellows wheel.
My child poet picked out the letters
On the grey stone,
In silver the wonder of a Christmas townland,
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.
Across the wild bogs his melodeon calledTo Lennons and Callans.
As I pulled on my trousers in a hurry
I knew some strange thing had happened.
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.
Cassiopeia was over
Cassidy’s hanging hill,
I looked and three whin bushes rode across
The horizon — The Three Wise Kings.
The winking glitter of a frosty dawn.
I nicked six nicks on the door’post
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.
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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