The Garden Seat
A poem by Patrick Deeley

The Garden Seat

Though there is the cracked bedroom ceiling
and the scraping front gate, we give precedence
to restoring the garden seat. It mends us

in return. Where flowers grow or die,
how generously the sun shines, what
the red-berried whitebeam whispers and the ivy

greening the back wall hides, are little to do
with our restoration, yet they are all.
Seasons flip the weather about, blend, break,

follow. Life’s freshet of sensualities
never quite runs out. We dream back into place
the paddle pool where our children

dabbled, years ago, the climbing frame,
the games of football, frisbee and peek-a-boo,
even those mangled, floppy sunhats

forever falling over their eyes. Then,
out of the busy ambits of their grown-up lives,
our children return – and there’s this

sudden catch of breath, as when we step into
a room to find the risen moon standing
at a window. They come, they soon go,

and again this wrought-iron garden seat finds us
looking each other full in the eye
when we speak and touching off old affection.

About the Author:

Patrick Deeley is a poet, memoirist and children’s author from Loughrea, County Galway. He has received many awards for his writing including The 2019 Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Poetry Award. Seven collections of his poems have been published by Dedalus Press, most recently ‘Groundswell: New and Selected’, and ‘The End of the World’.

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