We watched on the bulging screen
of a Bush television, set in the corner
of a dark, afternoon living room
that smelled of salad and sea. Our cousins’
clapboard holiday home, marine blue
shutters closed against the sun, we sat
silently on the floor between the legs
of grown-ups who talked as they passed
sandwiches around. At full-time we burst
blinking into the light, to replay the goals
and imitate our heroes. Being slightly older,
my brother had first pick and chose Geoff Hurst,
taking immediate possession of the ball,
while I, a nine-year-old in salt-bleached hair,
who pictured himself as Siggi Held,
reluctantly went in goal and, between shots,
cast a furtive eye on the scorched path
twisting down the hill, hoping to catch
a glimpse of the girl in the blue summer dress.
© Maurice Devitt
Picture 10167778, photograph by Tony Boxall, early 1970s, image copyright Mary Evans / Tony Boxall
A previous winner of the Trocaire/Poetry Ireland, Bangor and Poems for Patience competitions, Maurice Devitt was a featured poet at the Poets in Transylvania Festival in 2015 and a guest speaker at the John Berryman Centenary Conference in both Dublin and Minneapolis. His poems have been published widely and he has been nominated for Pushcart, Forward and Best of the Net prizes. His Pushcart-nominated poem, ‘The Lion Tamer Dreams of Office Work’, was the title poem of an anthology published by Hibernian Writers in 2015. He is curator of the Irish Centre for Poetry Studies site and in 2018 published his debut collection, Growing Up in Colour, with Doire Press, who will also publish his new collection, Some of These Stories are True, in 2023.
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