The poet Dennis O’Driscoll died on Christmas Eve, 2012.

Today, the winter solstice when the North Pole is tilted furthest away from the sun, marks the shortest day and the longest night of 2015. For me, the significance of the astronomical alignment extends also to the existential, and makes me consider what being human might mean in this extraordinary and often inexplicable physical world that we inhabit.

I look to the words of Dennis O’Driscoll:

You

Be yourself: show your flyblown eyes

to the world, give no cause for concern,

wash the paunchy body whose means you

live within, suffer the illnesses

that are your prerogative alone –

 

the prognosis refers to nobody but you;

you it is who gets up in the morning

in your skin, you who chews your dinner

with your mercury-filled teeth, gaining

garlic breath or weight, you dreading,

 

you hoping, you regretting, you interloping.

The earth has squeezed you in, found you space;

any loss of face you feel is solely yours –

you with the same old daily moods, debts,

intuitions, food fads, pet hates, Achilles’ heels.

 

You carry on as best you can the task of being,

whole-time, you; you in wake and you in dream,

at all hours, weekly, monthly, yearly, life,

full of yourself as a tallow candle is of fat,

wallowing in self-denial, self-esteem.

 

Dennis O’Driscoll