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15 Jan 2006 @ 17:14
I have a great love of Ireland, but she has been a vast source of human grief. I have set my blood line into her stones and my human tears are her Corrib and the waterfall of the Galway Salmon weir. And the ancient longing with a human heart. Is her Curlews calling across silent lakes.
Kernerewek.
Haunting.
All the Ghosts of Ireland
Are at my fingertips,
Become embroidered in the night
And each one is welcome.
Never forgo this long love
Or Colleens in my dreams.
Yeats tower is still a moulded place.
Each stone set with poetry
Among the ivy and the crevice nests.
Where is freedom? from the conquest,
Idealists raising voice
By flowered boiling over turf
And cold tea, in the dig of bog.
Division is the curse of men
Human nature will not rest,
But follow course, and rut way
Boreen. Hollow. Valley and the hills,
Through all the Glens of Antrim
And Conemarras sway. The Corrib
And the water lilt of Curlews,
Calling. Calling soul to Ireland.
No Yeats tower for this solitude
Or space of quiet bog.
All these common Ghosts
Stamp before me in a mass,
State their case for welcome.
Let Yeats Ghost stand before me,
Tell me. Where I am wrong,
Or what is right? In each word
Through each long, long sitting.
Declare a common reason,
For this unknown thing.
I do not understand it
Or reason it for self.
Kererewek. August 1991.
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4 comments
16 Jan 2006 @ 09:28 by jazzolog : Since There Is Silence
beneath this poem, I'll snuggle into comment joining the other lovely souls who have welcomed you before me. I love the peaceful lookback of these attic ramblings and am so grateful you've decided to set up "shop." I think we have rather a lot in common...though you have more talent---and a curiosity about punctuation that apparently precludes the long, complicated sentences I like to write...resulting in a readership of very few. (But no matter.) I await the next poem to float from that high window.
16 Jan 2006 @ 12:37 by nraye : Ireland
has a freedom of its own, as renowed as the French, with its own romantic historical connections, creating a far wider gulf than the Irish Sea admits from the larger is-land. Fresh fresh Westerly air just off the Atlantic is blowing here, not a cob web in site!
17 Jan 2006 @ 09:22 by kernerewek : Ah!
Well punctuation is something I just throw in now and then. A case of pot luck!
17 Jan 2006 @ 09:33 by kernerewek : This is Ireland. nraye.
Ireland you have been so much grief
And yet the earth still stick the root
I kick it, pull it, never budge, never gives.
I curse her then, a long breath shout
And love her as I loved that first sight...
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