Will You Taste Some Irishness? III (2004)

Today's poem:

'Quarantine'


In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking -they were both walking- north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and a woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.
(Eavan Boland)

For more on Eavan Boland go to:
http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/Boland.html

Thank you, jjorge..

jjorge

Wonderful to see you here again!

Slainte!

Whew... a heavy image of love, Jjorge!

Great news that you've revived this thread. I think of you whenever I see new Guinness Beer commercial, with the three guys celebrating St. Paddy's Day like Christmas. (I hope you've seen it, it's pretty funny.)

Here's the beginning few verses of a poem I've been reading called Mary Hynes, by Padraic Fallon.

MARY HYNES
(After the Irish of Raftery)

That Sunday, on my oath, the rain was a heavy overcoat
On a poor poet, and when the rain began
In fleeces of water to buckleap like a goat
I was only a walking penance reaching Kiltartan;
And there, so suddenly that my cold spine
Broke out on the arch of my back in a rainbos,
This woman surged out of the day with so much sunlight
I was nailed there like a scarecrow,

But I found my tongue and the breath to balance it
And I said:"If I bow to you with this hump of rain
I'll fall on my collarbone, but look, I'll chance it,
And after falling, bow again."
She laughed, ah, she was gracious, and softly said to me,
For all your lovely talking I go marketing with an ass,
I'm no hill-queen, alas, or Ireland, that grass widow,
So hurry on, sweet Raftery, or you'll keep me late for Mass!"

The parish priest has blamed me for missing second Mass
And the bell talking on the rope of the steeple,
But the tonsure of the poet is the bright crash
Of love that blinds the irons on his belfry;
Were I making an Aisling I'd tell the tale of her hair
But now I've grown careful of my listeners
So I pass over one long day and the rainy air
Where we sheltered in whispers.

This continues for eight more stanzas. I couldn't find it online in a brief search so I've had to key it all in. I'll finish it later though, if you like.
Raftery (1784?-1835) was a famous itinerant Irish bardic poet, and Mary Hynes was the peasant girl who he made famous in his verse.

edit-- corrected belfry spelling (Thanks Mark!)

Oh, the days of the Kerry dancing
Oh, the ring of the piper's tune
Oh, for one of those hours of gladness,
Gone, alas, like our youth, too soon!

When the boys began to gather
In the glen of a summer night
And the Kerry piper's tuning
Made us long with wild delight!
Oh, to think of it,
Oh, to dream of it
Fills my heart with tears!

Oh, the days of the Kerry dancing
Oh, the ring of the piper's tune
Oh, for one of those hours of gladness,
Gone, alas, like our youth, too soon!

Time goes on, and the happy years are dead.
And one by one, the merry hearts are fled.
Silent now is the wild and lonely glen,
Where the bright glad laugh will echo ne'er again.
Only dreaming of days gone by, in my heart I hear

Loving voices of old companions
Stealing out of the past once more,
And the sound of the dear old music,
Soft and sweet as in days of yore.

When the boys began to gather
In the glen of a summer night,
And the Kerry piper's tuning
Made us long with wild delight,
Oh, to think of it,
Oh, to dream of it
Fills my heart with tears!

Oh, the days of the Kerry dancing
Oh, the ring of the piper's tune
Oh, for one of those hours of gladness,
Gone, alas, like our youth, too soon!

This is a wonderful idea, Jjorge. My grandmother was Irish, from Carlow, and she liked this poem; such a sad history:

An Irish airman forsees his death:

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My county is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan's poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

Thanks dròm!

One good Yeats poem deserves another - maybe TWO!
Here is today's 'Taste of Irishness':






'The Coming of Wisdom with Time'

Though leaves are many, the root is one;
Through all the lying days of my youth
I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
Now I may wither into the truth.
-W. B. Yeats








'Where My Books Go'

ALL the words that I utter,
And all the words that I write,
Must spread out their wings untiring,
And never rest in their flight,
Till they come where your sad, sad heart is, 5
And sing to you in the night,
Beyond where the waters are moving,
Storm-darken'd or starry bright.
-W.B. Yeats




For more on William Butler Yeats go to:
http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?45442B7C000C070401
http://www.bartleby.com/people/Yeats-Wi.html
http://www.online-literature.com/yeats/

Osso Margo, Piffka, GeorgeOb, dròm_et_rêve ...It's NICE to see you all here!

Say, why don't we all go down to the glen for an hour of gladness?

(or even go to San Francisco 4-9 to 4-12 for FOUR DAYS of gladness!)*



























*shameless promotion of the April San Fran gathering
http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=19053&highlight=

A couple of short jewels from Yeats

A mermaid found a swimming lad,
Picked him for her own,
Pressed her body to his body,
Laughed; and plunging down
Forgot in cruel happiness
That even lovers drown.

another

Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That's all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh

Thanks George!






For today:

'A Runaway Cow'
(for Liam O' Muirthile)



I'd say he'd had too much
of the desolation that trickles down
through the glens and the hillocks
steadily as a hearse;
of the lifeless villages in the foothills
as bare of young folk as of soil;
of the old codgers, the hummock-blasters
who turned the peat into good red earth
and who deafened him pink year after year
with their talk of the grand sods of the old days;

of the little white bungalows, attractive
as dandruff in the hairy armpit of the Glen;
of the young people trapped in their destinies
like caged animals out of touch with their instinct;
of the Three Sorrows of Storytelling
in the pity of unemployment, of low morale,
and of the remoteness and narrow-mindedness
of both sides of the Glen;
of the fine young things down in Rory's
who woke the man in him
but wouldn't give a curse for his attentions;

of clan boundaries, of old tribal ditches,
of pissing his frustration against the solid walls
race and religion built round him.
He'd had too much of being stuck in the Glen
and with a leap like a runaway cow's one Spring morning
he cleared the walls and hightailed away.

-Cathal O' Searcaigh*, 'An Bealach 'na Bhaile' ('Homecoming')
trans. Patrick Crotty







*Cathal O' Searcaigh was born in 1956 in an Irish speaking area of County Donegal. All of his work is in Irish and is published with translations into English made by other people. Much of his poetry is about the landscape near the small hill farm at the foot of Mount Errigal where he now lives.
His collections include Suibhne (Sweeney), An Bealach ?'na Bhaile (Homecoming) and Out in the Open.


http://www.salmonpoetry.com/gallery/osearcaigh.jpg

WHEN I play on my fiddle in Dooney,
Folk dance like a wave of the sea;
My cousin is priest in Kilvarnet,
My brother in Moharabuiee.


I passed my brother and cousin:
They read in their books of prayer;
I read in my book of songs
I bought at the Sligo fair.


When we come at the end of time,
To Peter sitting in state,
He will smile on the three old spirits,
But call me first through the gate;


For the good are always the merry,
Save by an evil chance,
And the merry love the fiddle
And the merry love to dance:


And when the folk there spy me,
They will all come up to me,
With ?'Here is the fiddler of Dooney!'
And dance like a wave of the sea.

SHE MOVED THROUGH THE FAIR


My young love said to me, "My mother won't mind
And my father won't slight you for your lack of kind"
And she stepped away from me and this she did say:
It will not be long, love, till our wedding day"

As she stepped away from me and she moved through the fair
And fondly I watched her move here and move there
And then she turned homeward with one star awake
Like the swan in the evening moves over the lake

Last night she came to me, my dead love came in
So softly she came that her feet made no din
As she laid her hand on me and this she did say
"It will not be long, love, 'til our wedding day"
- Padraic Collum
http://www.longfordtourism.com/heritage/padraiccolum.html

For Friday March 12th:



'The Awakening of Dermuid'


In the sleepy forest where the bluebells
Smouldered dimly through the night,
Dermuid saw the leaves like glad green waters
At daybreak flowing into light,
And exultant from his love upspringing
Strode with the sun upon the height.

Glittering on the hilltops
He saw the sunlit rain
Drift as around the spindle
A silver-threaded skein,
And the brown mist whitely breaking
Where arrowy torrents reached the plain.

A maddened moon
Leapt in his heart and whirled the crimson tide
Of his blood until it sang aloud of battle
Where the querns of dark death grind,
Till it sang and scorned in pride
Love?-the froth-pale blossom of the boglands
That flutters on the waves of the wandering wind.

Flower-quiet in the rush-strewn sheiling
At the dawntime Grainne lay,
While beneath the birch-topped roof the sunlight
Groped upon its way
And stooped above her sleeping white body
With a wasp-yellow ray.

The hot breath of the day awoke her,
And wearied of its heat
She wandered out by the noisy elms
On the cool mossy peat,
Where the shadowed leaves like pecking linnets
Nodded around her feet.

She leaned and saw in the pale-grey waters,
By twisted hazel boughs,
Her lips like heavy drooping poppies
In a rich redness drowse,
Then swallow?-lightly touched the ripples
Until her wet lips were
Burning as ripened rowan berries
Through the white winter air.

Lazily she lingered
Gazing so,
As the slender osiers
Where the waters flow,
As green twings of sally
Swaying to and fro.

Sleepy moths fluttered
In her dark eyes,
And her lips grew quieter
Than lullabies.
Swaying with the reedgrass
Over the stream
Lazily she lingered
Cradling a dream.

-- Austin Clarke--
(From "The Vengeance of Finn.")

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_Clarke_(poet)
http://homepage.tinet.ie/~splash/Aspects.html

Bonus poem for today;




A Lament for the Princes of Tyrone and Tyrconnel




O WOMAN of the piercing wail,
Who mournest o'er yon mound of clay
With sigh and groan,
Would God thou wert among the Gael!
Thou would'st not then from day to day
Weep thus alone.
'Twere long before around a grave
In green Tyrconnel, one could find
This loneliness;
Near where Beann-Boirche's banners wave,
Such grief as thine could ne'er have pined
Companionless.

Beside the wave in Donegal,
In Antrim's glens, or fair Dromore,
Or Killilee,
Or where the sunny waters fall
At Assaroe, near Erna shore,
This could not be.
On Derry's plains, in rich Drumcliff,
Throughout Armagh the Great, renowned
In olden years,
No day could pass but woman's grief
Would rain upon the burial-ground
Fresh floods of tears!

O no!?-From Shannon, Boyne, and Suir,
From high Dunluce's castle-walls,
From Lissadill,
Would flock alike both rich and poor:
One wail would rise from Cruachan's halls
To Tara Hill;
And some would come from Barrow-side,
And many a maid would leave her home
On Leitrim's plains,
And by melodious Banna's tide,
And by the Mourne and Erne, to come
And swell thy strains!

O, horses' hoofs would trample down
The mount whereon the martyr-saint
Was crucified;
From glen and hill, from plain and town,
One loud lament, one thrilling plaint,
Would echo wide
There would not soon be found, I ween,
One foot of ground among those bands
For museful thought,
So many shriekers of the keen
Would cry aloud, and clap their hands,
All woe-distraught!

Two princes of the line of Conn
Sleep in their cells of clay beside
O'Donnell Roe:
Three royal youths, alas! are gone,
Who lived for Erin's weal, but died
For Erin's woe.
Ah, could the men of Ireland read
The names those noteless burial-stones
Display to view,
Their wounded hearts afresh would bleed,
Their tears gush forth again, their groans
Resound anew!

The youths whose relics moulder here
Were sprung from Hugh, high prince and lord
Of Aileach's lands;
Thy noble brothers, justly dear,
Thy nephew, long to be deplored
By Ulster's bands.
Theirs were not souls wherein dull time
Could domicile decay, or house
Decrepitude!
They passed from earth ere manhood's prime,
Ere years had power to dim their brows,
Or chill their blood.

And who can marvel o'er thy grief,
Or who can blame thy flowing tears,
Who knows their source?
O'Donnell, Dunnasava's chief,
Cut off amid his vernal years,
Lies here a corse
Beside his brother Cathbar, whom
Tyrconnell of the Helmets mourns
In deep despair:
For valour, truth, and comely bloom,
For all that greatens and adorns,
A peerless pair.

Oh, had these twain, and he, the third,
The Lord of Mourne, O'Niall's son
(Their mate in death),
A prince in look, in deed, and word,
Had these three heroes yielded on
The field their breath,
Oh, had they fallen on Criffan's plain,
There would not be a town or clan
From shore to sea,
But would with shrieks bewail the slain,
Or chant aloud the exulting rann
Of jubilee!

When high the shout of battle rose,
On fields where Freedom's torch still burned
Through Erin's gloom,
If one, if barely one of those
Were slain, all Ulster would have mourned
The hero's doom!
If at Athboy, where hosts of brave
Ulidian horsemen sank beneath
The shock of spears,
Young Hugh O'Neill had found a grave,
Long must the North have wept his death
With heart-wrung tears!

If on the day of Ballach-myre
The Lord of Mourne had met thus young,
A warrior's fate,
In vain would such as thou desire
To mourn, alone, the champion sprung
From Niall the Great!
No marvel this?-for all the dead,
Heaped on the field, pile over pile,
At Mullach-brack,
Were scarce an eric for his head,
If death had stayed his footsteps while
On victory's track!

If on the Day of Hostages
The fruit had from the parent bough
Been rudely torn
In sight of Munster's bands-MacNee's?-
Such blow the blood of Conn, I trow,
Could ill have borne.
If on the day of Ballach-boy
Some arm had laid by foul surprise,
The chieftain low,
Even our victorious shout of joy
Would soon give place to rueful cries
And groans of woe!

If on the day the Saxon host
Were forced to fly?-a day so great
For Ashanee?-
The Chief had been untimely lost,
Our conquering troops should moderate
Their mirthful glee.
There would not lack on Lifford's day,
From Galway, from the glens of Boyle,
From Limerick's towers,
A marshalled file, a long array
Of mourners to bedew the soil
With tears in showers!

If on the day a sterner fate
Compelled his flight from Athenree,
His blood had flowed,
What numbers all disconsolate,
Would come unasked, and share with thee
Affliction's load!
If Derry's crimson field had seen
His life-blood offered up, though 'twere
On Victory's shrine,
A thousand cries would swell the keen,
A thousand voices of despair
Would echo thine!

Oh, had the fierce Dalcassian swarm
That bloody night of Fergus' banks
But slain our Chief,
When rose his camp in wild alarm?-
How would the triumph of his ranks
be dashed with grief!
How would the troops of Murbach Mourn
If on the Curlew Mountains' day
Which England rued,
Some Saxon hand had left them lorn,
By shedding there, amid the fray,
Their prince's blood!

Red would have been our warriors' eyes
Had Roderick found on Sligo's field
A gory grave,
No Northern Chief would soon arise
So sage to guide, so strong to shield,
So swift to save.
Long would Leith-Cuinn have wept if Hugh
Had met the death he oft had dealt
Among the foe;
But, had our Roderick fallen too,
All Erin must, alas! have felt
The deadly blow!

What do I say? Ah, woe is me!
Already we bewail in vain
Their fatal fall!
And Erin, once the great and free,
Now vainly mourns her breakless chain,
And iron thrall.
Then, daughter of O'Donnell, dry
Thine overflowing eyes, and turn
Thy heart aside,
For Adam's race is born to die,
And sternly the sepulchral urn
Mocks human pride.

Look not, nor sigh, for earthly throne,
Nor place thy trust in arm of clay,
But on thy knees
Uplift thy soul to God Alone,
For all things go their destined way
As He decrees.
Embrace the faithful crucifix,
And seek the path of pain and prayer
Thy Saviour trod;
Nor let thy spirit intermix
With earthly hope, with worldly care,
Its groans to God!

And Thou, O mighty Lord! Whose Ways
Are far above our feeble minds
To understand,
Sustain us in these doleful days,
And render light the chain that binds
Our fallen land!
- James Clarence Mangan
(Translated from the Irish)


Hugh O'Neill (the Earl of Tyrone of English history) had been the leader of the most brilliantly conducted war waged by the Irish against the English in Ireland. He was forced to leave Ireland in 1607; his flight meant the passing of the leadership of the Gaelic nobles and the close of an epoch of Irish history. With O'Neill went the chief representatives of the great Ulster families. The poem is addressed to the Lady Nuala O'Donnell by the bard of the O'Donnells, Mac an Bhaird or Ward. The bard is supposed to discover the Lady Nuala weeping alone over the tomb of her brother Rory in the Church of S. Pietro Montorio on the Janiculum. He imagines the whole scene transferred to Ireland (which accounts for the image of the horses' hooves trampling down "The mount whereon the martyr-saint was crucified"), and he tells her how all Ireland, and especially all Northern Ireland, would join in her grief. Never was the attachment of the Irish to their nobles revealed more poignantly than in this poem that laments the passing of the greatest and truest of the Irish families.
from Padraic Colum, 'Anthology of Irish Verse' 1922.

Great stuff, Jjorge. Thanks. These poems are history lessons as well as art. Reminders, I guess, for their Irish readers.

Thank you, Jjorge, for posting such marvellous poems.

Personal Helicon-- Seamus Heaney

As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.

Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

The Fisherman

Although I can see him still.
The freckled man who goes
To a grey place on a hill
In grey Connemara clothes
At dawn to cast his flies,
It's long since I began
To call up to the eyes
This wise and simple man.
All day I'd looked in the face
What I had hoped 'twould be
To write for my own race
And the reality;
The living men that I hate,
The dead man that I loved,
The craven man in his seat,
The insolent unreproved,
And no knave brought to book
Who has won a drunken cheer,
The witty man and his joke
Aimed at the commonest ear,
The clever man who cries
The catch-cries of the clown,
The beating down of the wise
And great Art beaten down.
Maybe a twelvemonth since
Suddenly I began,
In scorn of this audience,
Imagining a man,
And his sun-freckled face,
And grey Connemara cloth,
Climbing up to a place
Where stone is dark under froth,
And the down-turn of his wrist
When the flies drop in the stream;
A man who does not exist,
A man who is but a dream;
And cried, "Before I am old
I shall have written him one
poem maybe as cold
And passionate as the dawn.'

G'Day Piffka drom, Osso, Margo, GeorgeOB, Mikey et al!

For today you will have a taste of Patrick Kavanagh.


from 'The Great Hunger'


I.

CLAY is the word and clay is the flesh
Where the potato-gatherers like mechanised scarecrows move
Along the side-fall of the hill -- Maguire and his men.
If we watch them an hour is there anything we can prove
Of life as it is broken-backed over the Book
Of Death? Here crows gabble over worms and frogs
And the gulls like old newspapers are blown clear of the hedges, luckily.
Is there some light of imagination in these wet clods?
Or why do we stand here shivering?
Which of these men
Loved the light and the queen
Too long virgin? Yesterday was summer. Who was it promised marriage to
himself
Before apples were hung from the ceilings for Hallowe'en?
We will wait and watch the tragedy to the last curtain,
Till the last soul passively like a bag of wet clay
Rolls down the side of the hill, diverted by the angles
Where the plough missed or a spade stands, straitening the way.

A dog lying on a torn jacket under a heeled-up cart,
A horse nosing along the posied headland, trailing
A rusty plough. Three heads hanging between wide-apart
Legs. October playing a symphony on a slack wire paling.
Maquire watches the drills flattened out
And the flints that lit a candle for him on a June altar
Flameless. The drills slipped by and the days slipped by
And he trembled his head away and ran free from the world's halter,
And thought himself wiser than any man in the townland
When he laughed over pints of porter
Of how he came free from every net spread
In the gaps of experience. He shook a knowing head
And pretended to his soul
That children are tedious in hurrying fields of April
Where men are spanging across wide furrows.
Lost in the passion that never needs a wife-
The pricks that pricked were the pointed pins of harrows.
Children scream so loud that the crows could bring
The seed of an acre away with crow-rude jeers.
Patrick Maquire, he called his dog and he flung a stone in the air
And he hallooed the birds away that were the birds of the years.

Turn over the weedy clods and tease out the tangled skeins.
What is he looking for there?
He thinks it is a potato, but we know better
Than his mud-gloved fingers probe in this insensitive hair.

'Move forward the basket and balance it steady
In this hollow. Pull down the shafts of that cart, Joe,
And straddle the horse,' Maguire calls.
'The wind's over Brannagan's, now that means rain.
Graip up some withered stalks and see that no potato falls
Over the tail-board going down the ruckety pass-
And that's a job we'll have to do in December,
Gravel it and build a kerb on the bog-side. Is that Cassidy's ass
Out in my clover? Curse o' God-
Where is that dog?
Never where he's wanted.' Maguire grunts and spits
Through a clay-wattled moustache and stares about him from the height.
His dream changes again like the cloud-swung wind
And he is not so sure now if his mother was right
When she praised the man who made a field his bride.

Watch him, watch him, that man on a hill whose spirit
Is a wet sack flapping about the knees of time.
He lives that his little fields may stay fertile when his own body
Is spread in the bottom of a ditch under two coulters crossed in Christ's
Name.

He was suspicious in his youth as a rat near strange bread,
When girls laughed; when they screamed he knew that meant
The cry of fillies in season. He could not walk
The easy road to destiny. He dreamt
The innocence of young brambles to hooked treachery.
O the grip, O the grip of irregular fields! No man escapes.
It could not be that back of the hills love was free
And ditches straight.
No monster hand lifted up children and put down apes
As here.
'O God if I had been wiser!'
That was his sigh like the brown breeze in the thistles.
He looks towards his house and haggard. 'O God if i had been wiser!'
But now a crumpled leaf from the whitethorn bushes
Dart like a frightened robin, and the fence
Shows the green of after-grass through a little window,
And he knows that his own heart is calling his mother a liar
God's truth is life- even the grotesque shapes of its foulest fire.

The horse lifts its head and cranes
Through the whins and stones
To lip late passion in the crawling clover.
In the gap there's a bush weighted with boulders like morality,
The fools of life bleed if they climb over.

The wind leans from Brady's, and the coltsfoot leaves are holed with rust,
Rain fills the cart-tracks and the sole-plate grooves;
A yellow sun reflects in Donaghmoyne
The poignant light in puddles shaped by hooves.

Come with me, Imagination, into this iron house
And we will watch from the doorway the years run back,
And we will know what a peasant's left hand wrote on the page.
Be easy, October. No cackle hen, horse neigh, tree sough, duck quack.



II.


Maquire was faithful to death:
He stayed with his mother till she died
At the age of ninety-one.
She stayed too long,
Wife and mother in one.
When she died
The knuckle-bones were cutting the skin of her son's backside
And he was sixty-five.
O he loved his mother
Above all others.
O he loved his ploughs
And he loved his cows
And his happiest dream
Was to clean his arse
With perennial grass
On the bank of some summer stream;
To smoke his pipe
In a sheltered gripe
In the middle of July-
His face in a mist
And two stones in his fist
And an impotent worm on his thigh.

But his passion became a plague
For he grew feeble bringing the vague
Women of his mind to lust nearness,
Once a week at least flesh must make an appearance.

So Maguire got tired
Of the no-target gun fired
And returned to his headland of carrots and cabbage
To the fields once again
Where eunichs can be men
And life is more lousy than savage.


III.


Poor Paddy Maguire, a fourteen-hour day
He worked for years. It was he that lit the fire
And boiled the kettle and gave the cows their hay.
His mother tall hard as a Protestant spire
Came down the stairs at the kettle-call
And talked to her son sharply: 'Did you let
The hens out, you?' She had a venomous drawl
And a wizened face like moth-eaten leatherette.
Two black cats peeped between the banisters
And gloated over the bacon-fizzling pan.
Outside the window showed tin canisters.
The snipe of Dawn fell like a whirring stone
And Patrick on a headland stood alone.

The pull is on the traces, it is March
And a cold black wind is blowing from Dundalk.
The twisting sod rolls over on her back-
The virgin screams before the irresistible sock.
No worry on Maguire's mind this day
Except that he forgot to bring his matches.
'Hop back there Polly, hoy back, woa, wae,'
From every second hill a neighbor watches
With all the sharpened interest of rivalry.
Yet sometimes when the sun comes through a gap
These men know God the Father in a tree:
The Holy Spirit is the rising sap,
And Christ will be the green leaves that will come
At Easter from the sealed and guarded tomb.

Primroses and the unearthly start of ferns
Among the blackthorn shadows in the ditch,
A dead sparow and an old waistcoat. Maguire learns
As the horses turn slowly round the which is which
Of love and fear and things half born to mind.
He stands between the plough-handles and sees
At the end of a long furrow his name signed
Among the poets, prostitute's. With all miseries
He is one. Here with the unfortunate
Who for half-moments of paradise
Pay out good days and wait and wait
For sunlight-woven cloaks. O to be wise
As Respectability that knows the price of all things
And marks God's truth in pounds and pence and farthings....

from, Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poems,
Norton and Company.

For more on PK go to:
http://www.nortonpoets.com/kavanaghp.htm
http://www.patrickkavanaghcountry.com/

For Sunday March 14, 2004:


'Synge's Grave'



MY grief! that they have laid you in the town
Within the moidher of its thousand wheels
And busy feet that travel up and down.

They had a right to choose a better bed
Far off among the hills where silence steals
In on the soul with comfort-bringing tread.

The curlew would have keened for you all day,
The wind across the heather cried Ochone
For sorrow of his brother gone away.

In Glenmalure, far off from town-bred men,
Why would they not have left your sleep alone
At peace there in the shadow of the glen?

To tend your grave you should have had the sun,
The fraughan and the moss, the heather brown
And gorse turned gold for joy of Spring begun

You should have had your brothers, wind and rain,
And in the dark the stars all looking down
To ask, "When will he take the road again?"

The herdsmen of the lone back hills, that drive
The mountain ewes to some far distant fair,
Would stand and say, "We knew him well alive,

That God may rest his soul!" then they would pass
Into the silence brooding everywhere,
And leave you to your sleep below the grass.

But now among these alien city graves,
What way are you without the rough wind's breath
You free-born son of mountains and wild waves?

Ah! God knows better?-here you've no abode,
So long ago you had the laugh at death,
And rose and took the windswept mountain road.
-Winnifred Letts
(from: Padraic Colum, 'Anthology of Irish Verse', 1922)

For more on Winnifred Letts go to:
http://www.pdevlinz.btinternet.co.uk/P_all14.htm
http://209.16.199.17/lieder/l/letts/