(Reverend) Patrick Deighan 

Laytown, County Meath, Ireland 

Born 7th April, 1931, at Castletown - Kilpatrick, Navan, Co. Meath, Ireland. Parents: John and Ann Deighan; Educated at St. Finian's College and Maynooth College; Retired priest; B.A. degree (Honours Classics) and B.D. 1st Prize twice for poems at Listowel Writer's Week; Poems published in national and local newspapers, magazines and anthologies, poems read on national and local radio, also letters and poems on TV, articles and letters in newspapers and magazines; Perhaps my awareness of the fact that I was born on the same date as William Wordsworth has benefited my affinity with language and sense of word-magic! 

Infant Breath

Fleshed from a mystery Source
Beginningless, the Bethlehem Baby's
Breathing far outvalues every
Human utterance and common resonance
That ever broke the
Silence of our world.
Each hidden discord, too, it
Hushes in the awestruck worshipper,
Birthing a precious music in the
Hearing of open hearts.
For, unmasked here at
His lowly manger-bed, we
Inhale His simple Truth.
And from the soothing
Rhythm of His quiet breath
A soul-embracing silence grows-
Deeper far than absences of
Earth's familiar sounds.

No drama-curtain opens on the
Christmas Crib, as if the scene itself
Must curtain mystery and trap it
In an awesome silence better left
Alone when words would
Only fumble feeble commentary
On the fleshing of Divinity
Moulded figurines grow distinctly
Strange, birthing new perspectives--
The sort you get, perhaps, from
Gazing long at spaces between
Stars or what may lie beyond
Horizons of hills or sea.