St Vincent’s Hospital, December 2025
(in memory of Joe Boland)
Soon we shall all be shades, you’d say
at the end of a long and misspent night
ignited by booze, badinage and barbs;
or else, a mere few minutes after turning up
at our door to pace up and down the kitchen,
you’d say I’m out of here and be suddenly gone.
And now you really are gone. Oh, Joe, I miss
you terribly, though I’ve never quite known
what I think of you. But you’ve always been
such an unignorable presence in our lives,
not to mention a fount of general historical
and local knowledge, and such enormous fun, too,
that even when I’d want to strangle you
for your various, shall we say, indiscretions,
I’d be disarmed by your shrugging nonchalance
in the face of sibling disapproval. No matter:
you were always a loving, if often exasperated, father
to your four boys, and a cherished friend to so many
in your various careers: semi-state official, teacher,
even briefly (can you believe) undertaker – indeed
you’d have been amused at your own embalment
in that Dundrum funeral home: there was none
of the Joe I knew in that mummified apparition
where, true to the last, you evaded rigorous scrutiny.
