From Bath to Cork with Baby Grace

"I’m not singing tonight,
no procession for me I tell you.
I’ll sit in a corner
with my own angel.
My mother was my best friend,
she died on the fifteenth of April,
six years ago."

"Oh mine died when I was fifteen.
I’m going to watch the helpers sing:
they were coating their throats with honey."

"You can’t get decent honey in Lourdes,
were they using Manuka?" 

"I don’t believe in angels,
certainly not the kind you speak about.
But I won’t sing tonight."

"I had so little sleep."

"I never have any trouble sleeping.  
They want to clear the tables:
hurry up and drink your coffee." 

The two white-haired ladies from Limerick
went their ways
without realising they had similar plans for the evening. 

"I love being stupid
- it protects me from the Internet.
I don’t understand, anymore
- doesn’t bother me.
You can’t bug me with facts
- technology sucks,
as the youngsters say..."

After eighty-four years and sixty-two days,
she gave up impressing others,
drank French tea in the shade
- less than a mile from where Bernadette saw her first apparition.  

____________________________________________________________

"Are you a priest?"

"Me? Sure that’s my daughter."

"I know you, you’re a detective.  I’d know you anywhere" chipped in the painter from the sideline.

"My wife’s sister’s children babysat your brother’s children in Monaleen… And I beat your father-in-law 9&8 in Castletroy Golf Club in 1975."

"I’ll tell him that."

"Don’t you dare… We went down the 19th."

"In the dark?" 

The Snow Virgin sits 
where John Paul the twenty-third
had her put.

In those days, Roncalli
was a tough guy
devoted to perpetual unmeltable white mountain tops. 

She’s the statue of marble -
the one that holds her infant son
aloft over Gavarnie through the most passionate heat .

Such an organising force and love
qualified him for snowflake status
among the locals on the world stage. 

Grey, grey, my world is grey…
grey is my world, 
where the priest is in style.

Adare grey, Killfinan grey, Parteen grey,
St Joseph’s grey, St Mary’s grey,
Westbury grey…

The clergy here are grey -
Payne rules here OK!

Even Donal Murray wears it.

The Umbrella Man is on the mic
over lunch in the hotel.
We are primed for Gavarnie
with chorizo, boiled egg, salmon mayonnaise,
and so many slices of baguette
I could float in the holy water.

I’m forcing my mother to swallow tap water,
as if it was Schnapps in a glass
you throw over your shoulder.
She is threatened with a drip if she dehydrates.
The table is stocking up
for the high atmosphere of the mountains. 
We are Moses getting ready 
to climb for our burning bushes
in the territory of the snow.

This in the full flush of the underground International Mass,
where I saw the assembled thrown of Roman Catholic ritual
in all its glory.