A CHRISTMAS CHILDHOOD One side of the potato-pits was white with frost - How wonderful that was, how wonderful! And when we put our ears to the paling-post The music that came out was magical. The light between the ricks of hay and straw Was a hole in Heaven's gable. An apple tree With its December-glinting fruit we saw - O you, Eve, were the world that tempted me To eat the knowledge that grew in clay And death the germ within it! Now and then I can remember something of the gay Garden that was childhood's. Again The tracks of cattle to the drinking-place, A green stone lying sideways in a ditch Or any common sight the transfigured face Of a beauty that the world did not touch. My father played the melodion Outside at our gate; There were stars in the morning east And they danced to his music. Across the wild bogs his melodion called To Lennons and Callans. As I pulled on my trousers in a hurry I knew some strange thing had happened. Outside in the cow-house my mother Made the music of milking; The light of her stable-lamp was a star And the frost of Bethlehem made it twinkle. A water-hen screeched in the bog, Mass-going feet Crunched the wafer-ice on the pot-holes, Somebody wistfully twisted the bellows wheel. My child poet picked out the letters On the grey stone, In silver the wonder of a Christmas townland, The winking glitter of a frosty dawn. Cassiopeia was over Cassidy's hanging hill, I looked and three whin bushes road across The horizon -- The Three Wise Kings. An old man passing said: "Can't he make it talk" -- The melodion. I hid in the doorway And tightened the belt of my box-pleated coat. I nicked six nicks on the door-post With my penknife's big blade -- There was a little one for cutting tobacco. And I was six Christmases of age. My father played the melodion, My mother milked the cows, And I had a prayer like a white rose pinned On the Virgin Mary's blouse. -- Patrick Kavanagh