It’s how he handles animals that matters most

to him: needing to be firm and sure and gentle.

Only yesterday, we found a racing pigeon in a drain,

its raw neck craning from the voided body, pink

ringed legs surprisingly strong, and still he poked

at it with intent precision, deaf to our disgust; the

two escaping frogs I stopped the mower to point

out to him, and how he deftly tracked down each

one among the docks, homing them both into his

gently clenched old man’s fists - just as all the hens

ran amok when Whitey No-name speared a third

and paddled off, jelly limbs limply flapping from her

beak, the others bearing down in hot pursuit, and he

whooping at all creation, like the circus-master’s son.

John FitzGerald won the 2014 Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award and has been shortlisted for a 2015 Hennessy New Irish Writing Award.