Eggs in my kettle
I remember you, you had other faces because you were little and the night was scared and new . 1 hour before , you the oldest one had been blowing bubbles in the bath in your granny’s and now you were packed onto a health board taxi , your granny ’s unknow tears flowing and she told you she loved you .
We rolled the little ones in cotton wool feathers but I the big one remember the sordid sketches played out in the hotel vistas from across the street and I wondered how many others like me had been sent to the workhouse without a say. The young starlings did not know that Pox and chickens could kill their nanna so we kept pretending we were on holiday, after all the shit we had been given that day.
I remember boiling eggs in the kettle with you my first born rooster pointing out the fancy china asleep on her belly until morning.
One room , 2 beds and no future except your booking with Dickens on a Friday afternoon where you, like the poor fishermen’s children with no Steinbeck Pearl to sell prayed to a God unknown to give you a room for another week in the B&B with the nice lady who was a vegetarian like you.
You were afraid of Regina and the Cellis , of stories of clothes under the unclean and their mattresses , the untouchables with a Swiss Knife resting on the pillow of that borrowed bed.
where your head had no name but the streets changed as the sun disappeared on a bender for days on end and you my son was crying because there was a drunk man with his leg tangled on O’connell bridge and you were afraid he would fall in the water and I was afraid that if he fell he would be forgotten and I was scared that you my son would never forget it.
And the little one wanted to go busking with only 6 candles on her birthday cake ,all her innocence and her double name immortalized in sugar , I want to make money to give to you Mammy ! and I cried over and over in the shared toilet with a hidden cigarette.
In Charles street we waited full of our own biology because the toilets were too dirty to risk more disease and we held our hands and hearts together waiting for the weekly verdict on our poverty line ,and held our breath until the stay of execution was read , our freedom institutionalized for another 7 days , mammy making school lunches out of breakfast trays . The prairie , the little house ,our own Eastern block beds , the 4 cups and 4 saucers , the culmination of all our love and the new dog would come after 64 days .