SIXTY YEARS AGO
I’m trying to think what old people felt like sixty years ago
As I listened to what seemed to be accretions of pipe tobacco
With a voice. Oh my god, their voices! Daguerreotypes
Behind glass in their past, listing complaints and gripes
About the spoilt young. True, they had endured two great wars,
Four if they were Irish. It was hard not to see the running sores
Of all that stigmata, it was truly difficult not to be impressed.
Now I’m at an age where I have a personal gauge of the long past,
Disgusting in a way, brutal in its accrued ordinariness;
A kind of wearing down without adventure. Any distress
I felt was self-made, or almost. The painted shield
Of a welfare state protected us, wars were withheld
Or portioned out in a twenty-inch screen. Which is what I’m
Doing right now, the young keeping me at arm’s length, the line
Between them and me forever thickening. If they run
When they see an oldie grumbling they are only a new version
Of the kid I was over half a century ago. Ah, Life, it is a direct
Contact between ill-prepared surfaces, and when I recollect
Now I can see my inexplicable life as a thinning copper plate:
Impressionable without a negative, still happening too late.
Thomas McCarthy
Thomas McCarthy was born in Co. Waterford in 1954 and educated at University College Cork. He is a member of Aosdána. He worked for many years at Cork City Libraries. He has won many awards for his poetry, including The Patrick Kavanagh Award, the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize. His first collection was published by The Dolmen Press, Dublin, in 1978, and his Prophecy, was published by Carcanet Press, in 2019. Carcanet UK published Plenitude in 2025. His Memory, Poetry and the Party: Journals 1974-2014, and Questioning Ireland were recently published by The Gallery Press.
