Snoogliffers

Snoogliffers

The Masters cackled  the gossip  at break-time

over tea and custard creams at the back of the class,

omadáns all of a kind useless sons of useless fathers.

Snoogliffers we called you. Your whispered names

like the stones we bled on or picked up to throw.

Garda Flynn made more than one of his special school visits

to explain the signals, the long term effects-

red spots around the mouth and nose, glazed over eyes,

mood swings, fivers missing from purses, brain damage-

Keep away don’t speak turn your back and walk away.

Mom overheard talk of an epidemic in the churchyard

while Monsignor damned you through a winter of mass

to strait necked glazed men and women of the pews,

I hid behind my father’s leg in the  huge doorway

waiting with him for communion and the getaway.

Doing harm to no-one but yourselves you

spent a year at it in the shed before better things.

You would call me on my way home from school

“Lordan , Lordan, tell us about the constellations

the men on the moon, the stars in the sky,”.

******

Snoogliffers is from my 2007 collection The Boy in The Ring