Duncan Keegan

The American poet Robert Frost once observed that although both scholars and poets work from knowledge, they differ in the way they come by it.

Scholars get theirs along projected lines of logic.

And poets, theirs, you know, cavalierly, and as it happens, in and out of books, they stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them, like birds where they walk in the fields.

Now, I know I'm in a hall filled with scholars, and I'm no poet, but I am from Ireland.

A place where, even now, a poet, a maker of a poem, is seen as someone who has come by an uncommon kind of knowledge.

I mean, truly, there's so little left of that older Ireland.

But in the little that remains, and in those little truths that only loss can teach, we find small felicities, like how the word for art and that for science were once one and the same, alien.

Or a word like dawn, which in our older tongue can mean a poem, a gift or fate.

Or an ear for silence.

The high relief that lets a word perfect its progress into intimacy?

My wife Sarah has that.

A feel for how ambience, presence, the quality of a moment, they can all shape the meaning.

and weight of a word.

I've heard it when she's with her friends, and I've even seen it with our children.

Every week, Sarah used to drive our son Rory to a song and dance class in North Dublin.

And one evening, as I was watching them arrive back home, I realized that I could see Rory in the front seat, his face pale in the glow of the headlights.

And I could see his hands clasped to the seatbelt, the motion of his head just tilting and turning to look, and his bare arm raised just to point at something.

And then he pulled back and he was reaching for his mom just to tell her something.

I don't even know what it was because I couldn't hear anything.

But in that moment, I knew everything about that conversation.