Sean’s Ghost
leans over the garden wall
next the hairpin bend
to hand me a rosy apple
with the same gesture
he himself showed
of a stumblebum evening
when I was a child
making my way home after
a bad day at school.
Though the apple holds
no substance now,
and though the giver
is dead, the kindness
travels forward and back
through the years
and will not perish or grow
immaterial even if
forgotten or left unsaid.
Patrick Deeley is a poet, memoirist and children’s writer from County Galway. He has won many awards for his writing and seven collections of his poems have appeared from Dedalus Press.