Was he thinking aloud or trying
to help? If we had to stand up to spell
a word as Gaeilge, he croaked along with us
and that was all we had to go on with –
tossed every day
on the storm of sounds, the unintelligible language
that must have been beaten out of children
on the same spot a hundred years
before a language filled now with pain and spittle
and because he stuttered
in between the letters, his ‘uh’ and ‘eh’ and ‘ah’
could be taken for the wrong vowel,
the signal for him to dash
to the drawer for his stick.
We rocked in front of him, our ears
cocked to his tobacco breath,
another game of bluff.