NeuroDivine

For Thomas Woodgate, a fourteen-year-old boy from Callan

I am not bronze. I will not shine.
The rain has had its way.
I wear the colour of the fields
In winter after hay.

Look closer. I am made of gaps,
Of spaces left unfilled;
Like stories spoken half aloud,
Like names no stone has held.

Through me the light of Callan falls,
The traffic hums nearby;
schoolchildren pass with headphones on
Beneath September sky.

I stand for Thomas. Fourteen years.
A child by any measure.
The sort who should have lost his days
To fishing, games, leisure.

Instead the sea closed overhead,
The Leinster went below;
And everything he might have been
Sank with him in its flow.

Yet I am more than one young life.
I carry others too:
The farm boys from the Barrow lands,
The lads the Suir once knew.

The girls who nursed through blood and smoke,
The men who crossed the foam;
The ones who came with altered hearts,
And those who came ne’er home.

For Ireland learned to lower her voice
When speaking of that war.
Some memories were left outside,
Some never crossed the door.

Too British, some would sometimes say;
Too Irish, others thought.
While grief sat silent at the fire
For sons the island lost.

But rust remembers differently.
I do not choose a side.
The sea receives the rich and poor,
The foolish and the wise.

So stand a moment if you wish.
The town moves on. It should.
The dead ask little from the living,
Only to be understood.

And when the evening settles down
On stone and slate and spire,
You may see through my broken shape
The ghost of a vanished choir.

Not singing of old victory,
Nor empire, crown, or throne;
Only the young of Ireland lost,
And how they come on home.

I have visited Kilkenny many times, yet I had never noticed this sculpture before. On today’s day trip, its rusted, broken form stopped me: not polished bronze, but something weathered, open and incomplete.

Writing the poem became a way of looking through those gaps—towards Thomas, a fourteen-year-old boy from Callan who died when the Leinster sank, and towards all the Irish lives altered or lost in a war Ireland has not always known how to remember. The city moves around the sculpture, as cities must; but for a moment, poetry allowed me to stand still and listen.