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Doublereed Archive - Posting 000095.txt from 2006/12
From: Oboeeee@-----.com
Subj: [DR-L] Quote of the Day
Date: Fri, 22 Dec 2006 20:46:45 -0500
A Christmas Childhood
One side of the potato-pits was white with frost=E2=80=94
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=E2=80=94
O you, Eve, were the world that tempted me
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
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.
My father played the melodeon
Outside at our gate;
There were stars in the morning east
And they danced to his music.
Across the wild bogs his melodeon called
To Lennons and Callans.
As I pulled on my trousers in a hurry
I knew some strange thing had happened.
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.
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,
The winking glitter of a frosty dawn.
Cassiopeia was over
Cassidy's hanging hill,
I looked and three whin* bushes rode across
The horizon =E2=80=94 The Three Wise Kings.
An old man passing said:
'Can't he make it talk'=E2=80=94
The melodeon. I hid in the doorway
And tightened the belt of my box-pleated coat.
I nicked six nicks on the door-post
With my penknife's big blade=E2=80=94
There was a little one for cutting tobacco,
And I was six Christmases of age.
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.
-Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967) Irish poet
=20
*Medley: Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in the Morning - a couple of =20
traditional Irish tunes: a reel and a jig. MIDI arrangement for fiddle, =20
pennywhistle, bouzouki, bass, bodhran and bells. (2002)
http://members.accessbee.com/jkwasnik/midfiles.html
=20
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