I can't think of anywhere I'd rather have gone to school than Glenaan. In the early fifties, long before the world and its wife had gone binary, and all human life had been reduced to exy-ozee, Glenaan was home to an unlikely herd of digital reindeer - perhaps the first in Ireland. Few of the natives had seen them in the wild, but round about this time of year was the best time to spot them. The scholars of Glenaan paid special attention to the sounds they heard around them from now until the start of summer. They were listening for one thing - the sound of the first cuckoo. You could bet your life that on the first good day after someone had told the master they'd heard it, he'd march us out for what he called 'nature study'. Up the three big steps, through the green squeaky gate, four yards along the road, hugging the sandstone wall for fear of motor cars, and down the brambly lane to the river he'd parade us, in our twos - a stream of freckled girls, blond as the cornfields beside the school, sinuous as the trout that sunbathed in the river, and boys with damson quick-set haircuts and noses that ran like burns. And the reindeer? The boys wore corduroy jerkins, either bottle green or - I'm trying to find a polite way of putting this, but no, there is none - let's just say brown - that made them look like ploughed fields on the move. And it was across the tundra of their ganseys that those digital reindeer trooped. 'I seen her, Sir, I seen the cuckoo - look, Sir, over there!'
The Goose Wing
Miss Duffy is an angel. I know.
With a chalk-white whisk
She is fluffy-dusting her books, her angled desk,
The porcelain outer ring of her ink-well
With its iridescent crust of oak-gall ink.
I think
Of a bull's eye and I think of Saturn.
I remember the blue knuckle and the blood-red ulcer
On the bone-end of her goose wing.
She sips scalding black tea from a thermos flask,
Scolding to herself. She finishes in a jiffy.
Once more her wing-tip
Sweeps across Ulster
Scratching the dust off grey
Belfast and green Tyrone, Lough Neagh -
Itself torn from the oxter of an angel.