The Henhouse Boy

Your frail shape, luminous, / Weightless, is stirring the dust

It was several days after a trip to Washington State that I thought about the Henhouse Boy. I don’t know why the story popped into my head. Sometimes a stream of consciousness is the way to keep the mind from the trappings of inhibitions. So I made a mental note about the thought that popped into my head and tucked it away until today.

The story took place decades ago in Ireland about an illegitimate birth, a chicken coop, and a boy, Kevin. For those unfamiliar with Kevin’s story, it seems the thing of Celtic myth.

In the late 1940s, after her husband passed, Margaret Halfpenny, a widow, had a relationship with a younger man that lead to the birth of Kevin. In those days, such “illegitimacies” were kept quiet and handled indiscriminately.

At the time, Mary had four children with her late husband, three daughters and a son. To make ends meet, she rented parcels of her land and “kept chickens in two henhouses a short distance from the small farmhouse.”

Almost since birth, Mary kept Kevin locked away in one of the henhouses until 11-year-old Desmond Brown, while playing hide-and-seek with friends, stumbled upon the henhouse and a pair of squinting eyes that peered at him through a window.

Desmond told his friend Joseph Carsen and the two went back to the henhouse several times with other friends before one of the boys would go on to tell his father who alerted “the Royal Ulster Constabulary, Sergeant John Cross.”

Seven-year-old Kevin’s body was badly deformed after years of cramped quarters. He couldn’t speak and only made “hen-like" sounds. The boy’s spiritual, physical, and emotional deprivation would leave an indelible mark upon future Nobel Laureate, Seamus Heaney, a young man of about 17 when the incident was reported in the local newspaper. Heaney wrote a poem about the boy and the story was made into a short film.

Heaney’s poem about the Henhouse Boy is one of neglect, suffering, and pain. But, it has a metaphorical purpose that extends to the millions of boys unseen, unheard, and unacknowledged.

I suppose the story and Heaney’s poem left an indelible mark upon my memory only to resurface after a moment of great frustration, of the once again human failing to address the neglected boys who wonder the streets of Washington State and cities across the United States. The opioid fallen boy. The suicidal young man. The uneducated ones.

At a time when legislators had a chance to address human suffering, they chose to keep the boys caged, politicians words acting like slants of light that do not illuminate but bring us what Emily Dickinson called a “Heavenly Hurt” on winter afternoons, where “internal indifference” and “imperial affliction” are visited upon those in despair.

I have a message to all our Henhouse Boys. Don’t worry little Henhouse Boys, we see you and the millions of silhouettes like you. You are not forgotten. There are many looking to take you from the cages of indifference and bring you to the full light of compassion. In the words of a newly found friend; “we see you, we hear you, we got you.”