Dawn at St. Patrick's

There is an old statue in the courtyard that weeps, like Niobe, its sorrow in stone. The griefs of the ages she has made her own. Her eyes are rain-washed but not hard, her body is covered in mould, the garden overgrown. One by one the first lights come on, those that haven’t been on all night. Christmas, the harshly festive, has come and gone. No snow, but the rain pours down in the first hour before dawn, before daylight. Swift’s home for ‘fools and mad’ has become the administrative block. Much there has remained unchanged for many a long year — stairs, chairs, Georgian widows shafting light and dust, of the satirist; but the real hospital is a cheerful modern extension at the back hung with restful reproductions of Dufy, Klee and Braque. Television, Russian fiction, snooker with the staff, a sifter of Lucozade, a paragraph of Newsweek or the Daily Mail are my daily routine during the festive season. They don’t lock the razors here as in Bowditch Hall. We have remained upright — though, to be frank, the Christmas dinner scene, with grown men in their festive gear, was a sobering sight. I watch the last planes of the year go past, silently climbing a cloud-lit sky. Earth-bound, soon I’ll be taking a train to Cork and trying to get back to work at my sea-lit, fort-view desk in the turf-smoky dusk. Meanwhile, next door, a visiting priest intones to a faithful dormitory. I sit on my Protestant bed, a make-believe existentialist, and stare the clouds of unknowing. We style, as best we may, our private destiny; or so it seems to me as I chew my thumb and try to figure out what brought me to my present state — an ‘educated man’, a man of consequence, no bum but one who has hardly grasped what life is about, if anything. My children, far away, don’t know where I am today, in a Dublin asylum with a paper whistle and a mince pie, my bits and pieces making a home from home. I pray to the rain-clouds that they never come where their lost father lies; that their mother thrives; and that I may measure up to them before I die. Soon a new year will be here demanding, as before, modest proposals, resolute resolutions, a new leaf, new leaves. This is the story of my life, the story of all lives everywhere, mad fools whatever we are, in here or out there. Light and sane I shall walk down to the train, into that world whose sanity we know, like Swift to be a fiction and a show. The clouds part, the rain ceases, the sun casts now upon everyone its ancient shadow.