Bio
Patrick Deeley is a poet, memoirist and children's writer. His seventh collection, The End of the World, recently appeared from Dedalus Press. He is the 2019 recipient of the Lawrence O'Shaughnessy Poetry Award from the University of St Thomas, Minnesota. His bestselling memoir, The Hurley-Maker's Son, was shortlisted for the 2016 Irish Book of the Year Awards.
Patrick Deeley
To 'Venus of Willendorf'
Natural History Museum, Vienna
A light comes on, flute music plays, and as I watch you
float, illumined behind glass, my mind
goes back to a time when I walked everywhere, carrying
a comic or a rain-perished hurling ball,
or even the rubber bulb of an old car-horn, in my hand.
'Brought', as you must have been brought –
a plaything, a charm against evil, or the expression
of an impulse towards something aesthetic or beautiful.
Secrets you may hold about the lives
of the ancestors aren't, I suspect, so remote or mysterious
that they could never fall in with our dreaming,
or find kinship in the strolls of a child
paying respects to notions of fun and foray, even to home
as a breath caught between the last place and the next.