Around the Bridge, on a winter’s eve
A whisper blew between the trees
A chance so rare, to meet and see
A local, world celebrity
Big Pat
Poems
For Fear of Little Men
I will, as I promised, soon return to our analysis of ‘steps’ (of 100Ma!) in Earth’s history. I’m afraid however that, while strolling in Narrow Water Quarry, I was taken with a compulsion to walk once again through the Fairy Glen. So I did! And thought of William Allingham’s poem, beloved of our childhood and school days. You remember it!
The Fairies
Up the airy mountain
Down the rushing glen
We daren’t go a-hunting
For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk
Trooping all together
Green jacket, red cap
And white owl’s feather.
Down along the rocky shore
Some make their home
They live on crispy pancakes
Of yellow tide-foam;
Some in the reeds
Of the black mountain lake
With frogs for their watch-dogs
All night awake.
High on the hill-top
The old King rests
He is now so old and grey
He’s nigh lost his wits;
With a bridge of white mist
Columcille he crosses
On his stately journeys
From Slieve League to Rosses;
Or going up with music
On cold starry nights
To sup with the Queen
Of the gay Northern Lights.
They stole little Bridget
For seven years long
When she came down again
Her friends were all gone
They took her lightly back
Between the night and morrow
They thought that she was fast asleep
But she was dead with sorrow.
They have kept her ever since
Deep within the lake
On a bed of flag-leaves
Watching till she wakes.
By the craggy hillside
Through the mosses bare
They have planted thorn-trees
For pleasure here and there.
Is any man so daring
As dig them up in spite
He shall find their sharpest thorns
In his bed at night.
Up the airy mountain
Down the rushy glen
We daren’t go a-hunting
For fear of little men
Wee folk, good folk
Trooping all together
Green jacket, red cap
And white owl’s feather!
Eenie, meenie, monie my
‘Eenie meenie, monie my
Bessalooney, boney, stry
Hare, ware, crown, nack
Alko, balco, wee wo wack!’
Farewell Poem
Farewell to every hawthorn hedge, from Killeen to Belleeks
And every pool of sticklebacks and every shady creek
Imperfect Peace?
Peace broke out in 1994
Then the semantic battles
Began, highly explosive verbs
And nouns were fired
Without warning by all sides,
Sending newspaper editors
Diving to the floor.
The Twelfth of July
Now Willie was an Orangeman as loyal as can be
Virtuous and upright, a decent man was he
A man who’d always do his best to help a friend in need
Poem for Niamh
Niamh
Some hours ago the water fell
To christen you, to work its spell
And wipe your slate, we hope for good
But now your life is sleep and food
Which, with our love will, by your leave
Suffice you now, our darling Niamh.
This happy birth, two thousand years
Our harbinger of peace, endears
Weaves webs of steel to bind our hearts
A laser light to pierce the dark
Darling child, my dream come true
We celebrate this day for you.
Ravelling strands of families mesh
In love knots of two minds, one flesh
Our future’s not our own, we’ll weave
An in-law maze, we’ll nod and wave
With trust: and silently we’ll pray
So this is a billet-doux to say
That on this warm mid-summer’s day
Cradled on my lawn you lay
While all around the raucous sound
Of laughter echoed in the mind
Your loved ones celebrate with food
Your birth in Christ at Cherrywood.
Our journey through this life, this fate
Ordained as by a friendly state
From Avenue to leafy meadow
Track of forebears, free from sorrow
Come and join our happy throng
We’ve waited for you for so long.
The Second Coming – W.B. Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
It’s apposite to our present age – though previous, and probably future generations thought the same. Surely Britain and Ireland, and more so, America are currently in a political and cultural turmoil, where those who screamed loudest for a return of ‘control’ have demonstrated their inability to exercise even self-control: the falcon cannot hear the falconer; the falconer has an agenda of his own, which bears little relationship to the needs of the masses.
No government has a concrete agenda to control global warming and no means to enforce one, were they to turn their minds to it.
What is the nature of that ‘rough beast’ slouching to Bethlehem to be born?
Who knows? But cataclysm is at hand.