Prayer for an Irish Father

On a damp June Saturday, as colorless As cellar stone, the working classes from Dun Laoghaire spread their picnic blankets, tins, And soda bread along the coastal cliffs. Two hundred feet below, the ocean knocks Debris and timber on the rock, and near The precipice, I watch a father swing His daughter out, as though to loose her on That long descent, past rookeries of gulls As intricate as mosques, through casual Alliances of mist and fog, and toward The cowlicked Irish Sea, as fathomless And bitter as their history. With each Return, the young girl cries out her delight, Then girds once more against the peril there: As though she knows no child is desired wholly; That there is not a mother, dreading birth, Who does not sometime curse her recklessness, Nor father, yoked to press or forklift truck, Who has not brooded on the chance of some Untimely accident. Pray God that such Black thoughts do not now reach like beggar’s mitts Into his mind, or better pray that he Has vowed, despite them all, not to permit His difficult and gnarled grip to give.