At the Yeats exhibition in the National Library

He was forever making an exhibition

of himself, in public or in private,

in thrall to table-rapping and Maud Gonne,

away with the fairies or Cuchulain,

turned on by George’s automatic jottings.

He might have been less airy-fairy

and more grounded, but then

my father on lost evenings of my boyhood

might never have recited ‘The Stolen Child’

by heart from his sickbed – might never

have become this ghost awaiting me

in the National Library of Ireland,

the faint voice reaching me through glass,

intimately telling once again

of otherworld, enchantment, tears.

Michael Coady