Father Gerard at rest among your brethren

almost anonymously as you would have wished

with only pebbles to pick out your five foot two

your life the poetry water and wine

have so real a presence since that we

taste one in tasting the other

as we lay in Glasnevin a 100 year garland

lily and iris for man and poem together

Elected silence! sing to me…

Summer ends now, now barbarous in beauty the stooks…

Margaret are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

and through lines you willed us we may glimpse

a face gone pale with thinking a head too large

for a build slight as Beckett's

the English fingers the unreachable

melancholy of the artist

as we converge in tribute to our more than friend

and to your convert's almost medieval search for

certainties none of us dare expect

since we are all time's eunuchs

though you broke into wholeness at the end

and died like Simeon so happy

now as I commune here with the maker

of poems that will always make a difference

I see your pale face eyeing from a carriage

out of the puffing and clanking into

the Victorian station of Newbridge

catching at the accent of this remove

or arriving at your destination

black a black Jesuit suitcase some

volume in hand a theme and

walking slowly along the canal

breathing-in the place the bog air

its lost century the water above water

the rhythm of little Ireland opening in lock gates

and smiling through shyness when old Miss Cassidy

steps out to greet you opposite the very beech

where Father Prendergast was hanged

or genuflecting in surplice before the tabernacle

in the apse of St.