OF YOU MY HEART HAS SPOKEN

 

  Three Galway Hookers sailing. Saturday morning leisure. They were working boats in my Aran childhood, a fleet of them carrying turf to the island, unloading it by hand, casting it onto the pier. Well into adulthood the pier was my playground; hours watching. These black Hookers with their brown sails are now the bearers of memory, treasures of the past. I am drover driven down forty-eight years of memory A train passes on its way to Dublin, train of thought moving towards the approaching future, thinking of leaving again. Two more sleeps. No idea when a return will be possible in these uncertain coronavirus times. As long as the two-week quarantine remains in place it will be difficult to come home again before next August. But you never know. Back in my Tanzania days we got home only every two years and the luxury of phones hadn’t arrived. We didn’t hear each other’s voices, didn’t see each other’s faces. We wrote letters! And what a joy that was in its time.