September 1933

At school in the parish of Kilbride
the boy at the next desk stuck out a boot
and knocked my father's books awry.
The teacher, Father Cooney of the short fuse,
landed a slap, flat-handed, across my father's face
with a crack of lightning and a shower of stars,
shattering the optic nerve of his left eye.

Ten miles to Navan hospital
on the crossbar of a bike,
his eye throbbing like the hammers of hell.
He never told a soul what happened.
Bad luck to speak ill of the clergy.
You'd never do a day's good afterwards.

Did you realize what you did to him, Father,
or did you stay in the dark for the rest of your days?
After six weeks in hospital
he was ashamed to return to school.
Instead he fled to Dublin's Eye and Ear
where a doctor plucked the offending blue
and returned him a glass facsimile.

They say an amputated limb can twitch with memory.
Do his two eyes still gaze together in his mind's eye?
A north wind off the sea hurts the hollow place
and sometimes there's an irritation he can't explain
like sand in the socket, the gritty inception
of a pearl within an oyster.

What bothers you, Father?
The odd lapse of memory or a twinge
of rheumatism before it rains?
I'm warning you, Father,
even in Ireland they're questioning authority.
The others have my mother's eyes but I have his,
and if looks could kill you wouldn't have a prayer.