I Moved to the Far Side of the Bar

Finn’s blue hands pulled pale sugar beet from mud

in cold cliff fields for many months a year.

At times it snowed, often it rained. Sea winds raved,

sometimes rippled dark green sugar beet leaves.

He scowled. We were fourteen years old.

His thin lips tight. His white face clenched

against cold, clips round the ear, hard words.

His father’s tweed jacket frayed at the cuffs,

hung over the top of his Wellington boots.

A tough man, they said of his father.

Hard as nails that man.

I skirted around his father’s fields, searched

for early primroses on south facing banks,

carried my yapping dog out of the mud,

gazed out to sea, pretended I didn’t see Finn.

Yesterday I saw him for the first time in fifty years,

sitting lopsided on a barstool in An Seanachai.

His pinched boy’s face flabby from years

of whiskey drinking next to warm pub fires.