Ballyheigue Revisited
Heartyheads we called them, and you lay
Prone beside a rockpool to fish them,
Dangling a bent, barbless pin on a thread,
A piece of leathery báirneach for your bait.
First the transparent shrimp in sudden darts
Came gathering around the bait, their little
Tentative nosings vibrating up the thread.
Electric shockers, we said, in tingling delight.
But they were nothing to the heartyhead
That glided out from underneath a ledge,
Brushing aside seaweed and anemones,
Opening his fat mouth towards the bait.
He slipped off the pin. But now and again
You tugged him free of the pool and you stood
And whirled him round, scattering water
In triumphant, sunlit wheels, racing
Impossible distances across the sky
Until you slowed gradually, and anxious
To begin again you knelt and let him go.
More than thirty years later, as I picked
My steps over the same textures of rock -
The ribbed ones that were hard to walk, the smooth
Purple ones that held the heat of the sun -
He took my breath away, that boy -
Intent over the pool, the same
Red curls I once longed to grow out of -
Who looked at me incuriously for a moment
While something barbed and unimaginable
Tugged, and I was rooted to the spot.
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