A Journey: Infancy to Adolescence

  A Journey: Infancy to Adolescence

When I was young and pale, licked mammy clean,
And sent to the babies’ school I did not have to think.
Showered in ink from a font of cognitive thought,
I was by cane and kindness drilled in manipulation.
I sang my scales, learned my abc, chanted my tables,
Prayed in supplication and recited my catechism.

Wimple framed lips telling of patience, and virtue;
Unconscious propaganda. Tears shed for His suffering
On wimple rubbed cheeks silent tears for her sacrifice,
Mea culpa; my fault. The child she never had. I was
Tutored a trinity: sorrow, forgiveness and Catholic guilt,
Apprenticed as an altar boy and immersed in the Faith.

Her wrinkled lips blew youthful kindling glowing into
Sheffield sharp starlight that lead a blind believer along
A penitent path to priesthood. That was my route.
Given Knowledge at the Brothers’ grammar school
I learned Latin, declension, conjugation and masturbation.
I was roughed by rod and rugby into a concrete world.

From above the Titian blue, beyond the Sea of Tranquility,
From the purple and gold place where Gabriel fought Lucifer,
Came a ripple, a Life Force. Bare foot on this wave I surfed
Hot-breathed into adolescence and was propelled into puberty
By the strawberry sweet lips of Mary Mulhinnie. I made my choice;
Sexuality not celibacy: a different path, the same Destiny.