This is a poem I wrote a few months ago about my dear maternal Grandad, Paddy O'Connor,  who was one of the last of the old stone-masons in Waterford. Why he ended up as a stone-mason, working with his father, is another story. This poem comes with the statutory health warning!!

Woodbine

Although it’s fifty years or so ago,
The freshness of it all is startling.
Grandad, sitting in his favourite chair,
Elbow on the dresser’s ledge,
A-snooze as he always does
For ten short minutes after work,
Still dressed in his mason’s dungarees and dust.
Then he awakes,
His eyes a-twinkle, mischievous,
And before we children climb aboard
His cantering, galloping knees,
Holding tight to thumbs all rough like granite,
Limestone, sandstone,
With cllints and grykes gouged by the Winter’s winds,
He reaches for his Woodbines
And the daily evening ritual begins.

He takes the box,  a sacred, holy thing,
Reverently opens and unfolds the golden foil –
Warm, rich tobacco perfume fills the air
— I smell it, real as yesterday!
Fingers deft and gentle
Draw the precious treasure into view,
He taps one end and then the other,
Strikes the flame,
And those chisel-hardened hands
Rise with the grace and flow of Eastern dance
Synchronising lip and breath and glow
Of burning ash
And deep, unfiltered inhalation;
A moment’s pause;
The blissful, slow release;
Incense gently pouring from a censer,
And tensions, stresses, worries
Of another working day
Are breathed away,
Our Grandad is the boy at heart again.

Una Kavanagh. November 2017.