As many have walked this beach <br />As sat on Thomas Hardy's seat, <br /> <br />And if they were counted maybe more, <br />A doctor from London, a priest from Ecuador; <br /> <br />Yeats himself who was ten foot tall <br />To see all he saw, <br /> <br />Sydney Bernard, in the late afternoon, <br />Just out from the word-processor in his room. <br /> <br />We'd pass without a word <br />Nursing a hurt, <br /> <br />In the horrors of sobriety, <br />The discontent of solitude. <br /> <br />Austie himself who spent his life on ship <br />Travels the land on his new hip. <br /> <br />A dead ass which came in in a storm <br />Is buried three times and is three times reborn. <br /> <br />What would the living do <br />If they had not the dead to see to? <br /> <br />Mountbatten, Jack B., Norwegian sailors. <br />Annie-Come-Ashore, the Bruens, Sligo jailors. <br /> <br />Each walks to the edge of the surf. <br />One life for them was not enough. <br /> <br />Towards evening come nurses from Cregg, <br />On the first beach a Christian mission is fed. <br /> <br />Sometimes a golfer will stand on a sand dune, <br />A bishop appears, or two nuns, or no one. <br /> <br />The dead have a certain momentum. <br />Sometimes it's hard to keep up with them. <br /> <br />I fall into step with some other <br />Who came up for the day with his mother? <br /> <br />In a different century, <br />A sprightly lad, malevolent, pernickety. <br /> <br />The three beaches are crowded though you can't see a soul. <br />The practical, the comfortable, the vulnerable. <br /> <br />And what do they see when they turn to come back? <br />The living out swimming or the solitude they lack? <br /> <br />How will I be when I have not the second or the third <br />To walk at night looking for the right word.<br /><br />Dermot Healy<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/rosses-point/
