Crashing The Hill (For Scarlett) Poem by Dónall Dempsey

One day Daddy
(the man in Mummy’s bed)

on his way
home

from school of
darling daughters

once perched
the prettiest little bird

on the cross bar
of his bicycle

as they flew
in fusion

a confusion of
darling Daddy & daughter

down Dobbins’s
Biddy’s Hill

time whistling
through their curly hair

the thrill
of wind & speed

suddenly crashing
to a halt

greeting the telegraph

pole out side Sheean’s
the shoemender’s shop

as if a
comma

had become
a full stop.

Carted off to hospital
by an hysterical ambulance

as the little girl
ran all the way home

clasping all the terror
in her tight little hand

nothing not even
a grazed knee

to show for all
the drama

to tell her Mummy
that her Daddy

“...was after crashing
the hill

on a bicycle
to hospital! ”

My mother
worrying the day

to death

but
he could be

visited so
I visited

him in Ward
No.7

where people
not well

lived in bed

& prayed to get
better

me searching all over

for the familiar
smile

that set fire
to my imaginations

but Daddy
was a mummy

all bandages
& groans

& in my nervousness
I gulped down

all the grapes

I had bought
for his recovery

but he moaned
that it was OK

so I devoured
everything in my fear.

Here now
in his great old age

the scar still
laughs

across his cheek

as somewhere inside him
the memory lives on & on

of him
crashing the hill.