From the recording Riversdale
An observational and gently nostalgic poem in which a childhood hospital is reconstructed through humour, peculiar detail and the obscure logic of recollection. Beneath its nuns, missing jigsaw pieces, juggling oranges and biscuit-factory air lies something more delicate — an affection for the small rituals through which people create order, comfort and care in a world that can never be made entirely complete.
Lyrics
Harcourt Street
Four pillars, a statue of a little boy,
a nun tiptoeing in squeaky black shoes,
stitches tight as nurses’ shoelaces,
each small act rehearsing order.
Dublin porters—witty—in coats
the colour of Butterscotch Angel Delight;
he pushed a trolley of jigsaws
with the last piece missing,
as though the hospital preferred
its puzzles slightly incomplete.
Surgeons took an appendix, then said
they didn’t need to—practice, perhaps,
for how we mend
what isn’t broken.
Beds butted doors like fairground bumpers.
Guessing footsteps by their echo,
Bewley’s coffee, Jacob’s biscuit factory,
the scent of work sweetening the air,
even as disinfectant ruled the wards:
lessons in how a place teaches
its way of being cared for.
Aunt Nellie caught the No. 1 bus
from a nursing home in Sandymount.
We played draughts;
Nurse Callaghan juggled three oranges—
a lesson, perhaps,
in keeping things aloft
when nothing asks to fall.
Dad drove us back to the bog,
the road coiled like memory itself.
I folded the corners of my bed,
and Mum was impressed,
though I knew
control is a comfort, not a cure.
I watched Hitchcock’s *The Birds*
and ate Garibaldi biscuits,
thanked God—
and thought
how every home
is a kind of ward,
how Harcourt Street waits in us all,
a place of order
and its counterwork.