Mid Term Break!

[Tommy]

Mid-Term Break

I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o' clock our neighbours drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying-
He had always taken funerals in his stride-
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were "sorry for my trouble".
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school,as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks.Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four-foot box, a foot for every year.

Seamus Heaney

One of his best if very sad poems! How do you grab "moments of magic" during your busy day. Moments that can amuse or inspire - and lift you in an otherwise routine day!

[John]

Nice poem Tommy with a final line that really hits the reader.... The title is like something from a black comedy. More like "the worst possible mid term break in hell"!

This one below is a WB Yeats poem that's still funnily enough very apt for the Ireland of Today

September 1913

What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone?
For men were born to pray and save:
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Yet they were of a different kind,
The names that stilled your childish play,
They have gone about the world like wind,
But little time had they to pray
For whom the hangman's rope was spun,
And what, God help us, could they save?
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Yet could we turn the years again,
And call those exiles as they were
In all their loneliness and pain,
You'd cry, 'Some woman's yellow hair
Has maddened every mother's son':
They weighed so lightly what they gave.
But let them be, they're dead and gone,
They're with O'Leary in the grave.

[Tommy]

Hi John- thanks for the post. A very interesting and thought provoking poem!

[MrsD007]

Mid Term Break is a wonderful poem but it is dreadfully sad. I love the poem "The Road not taken" by Robert Frost. It was a favourite of mine in school and on the day of my wedding I read it. When my daughter was diagnosed with special needs a friend gave me the poem. I feel it is an apt poem for parents of children with special needs. It is not a journey that anyone would choose for themselves but it can be an amazing life journey all the same.

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost

PS: For all the poetry lovers out there, Soundings (Leaving Cert. poetry book) has just been reprinted after being out of print for years. (€14.99)