King Cahill's Farewell To The Rye Field
WRITTEN TO THE LONDONDERRY AIR
'Tira autumn sun your shadow's flung, my Cahill,
Upon the field where now your reapmg's done,
Lo, there! And lo! Your reaper's wreath of rushes
Is on your forehead like a kingly crown.
'And I have come to name you King of Connacht,
And bid you where O'Connor's muster grows:
No shadow-king, but one to front the Norman,
And rear the standard that all Eire knows.'
'Farewell,' he said, 'farewell the field I've sickled,
Farewell the youths whose backs were bent with mine,
Farewell the maids whose singing now comes to me
'O Brighid, bless our fields, our roofs, our kine!''
'No Norman keep shall frown above your labors,
No pale they'll make to hold our Irish deer;
A true-born scion of Connacht's kings, I go now:
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poem by Padraic Colum
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Jackdaw
ALOOF from his tribe
On the elm-tree's top,
A jackdaw perched
A hand-reach up.
Silent he sat
On the branch, nor stirred,
And I saw m him
A changeling bird.
Grass was worn
Round pots and a pan,
A flea-bitten horse,
And a tilted van,
Where tinker's or gypsy's
Brats at play
Made vagrant's game of
Some citizen's way.
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poem by Padraic Colum
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Old Woman of the Roads
O, to have a little house!
To own the hearth and stool and all!
The heaped up sods against the fire,
The pile of turf against the wall!
To have a clock with weights and chains
And pendulum swinging up and down!
A dresser filled with shining delph,
Speckled and white and blue and brown!
I could be busy all the day
Clearing and sweeping hearth and floor,
And fixing on their shelf again
My white and blue and speckled store!
I could be quiet there at night
Beside the fire and by myself,
Sure of a bed and loth to leave
The ticking clock and the shining delph!
Och! but I'm weary of mist and dark,
And roads where there's never a house nor bush,
And tired I am of bog and road,
And the crying wind and the lonesome hush!
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poem by Padraic Colum
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An Old Woman of the Roads
O, to have a little house!
To own the hearth and stool and all!
The heaped up sods against the fire,
The pile of turf against the wall!
To have a clock with weights and chains
And pendulum swinging up and down!
A dresser filled with shining delph,
Speckled and white and blue and brown!
I could be busy all the day
Clearing and sweeping hearth and floor,
And fixing on their shelf again
My white and blue and speckled store!
I could be quiet there at night
Beside the fire and by myself,
Sure of a bed and loth to leave
The ticking clock and the shining delph!
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poem by Padraic Colum
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The Old College
Of the Irish, Paris
THE Lombards having gone back to their land,
We, who might never flock to native land
Except like birds that fly like fugitives,
Desperately, in a wind across the sea,
We drew our brood to their forsaken nest.
The Lombards’ halls became the Irelanders',
And charity was craved for us 'twas given
In names of Almantza and Namur,
Cremona, Barcelona, Charleroi
Fields that our soldiers bled on for a cause
Not ours, under command not ours.
Our order broken, they who were our brood
Knew not themselves the heirs of noted masters,
Of Columbanus and Erigena:
We strove towards no high reach of speculation,
Towards no delivery of gestated dogma,
No resolution of age-long dispute.
Only to have a priest beside the hedges,
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Condors
I. CONDORS FLYING
WE watched the Condors winging towards the Moon,
A Moon that glimmered in the blue daylight;
Around us were the Andes, and beyond
Andes, the Ocean, empty like the Moon.
I heard you speak in Atahualpa's tongue:
Then distances grew present; all the range
Of Condors' wings between my thought, your thought:
As though they had transcended need for wings,
We watched the Condors winging towards the Moon.
II. CONDORS IN THE JARDIN DES PLANTES
To sink into the depths we need take weights-
Put on such armour as our divers use;
To rise above the fathomed we must bear
Weights, and you are weighted for emprise
Of rising to where flows the thinnest air,
And here beneath our towers you roost and run,
And trail your wings. I think I know your pain,
Your pain and weariness!
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poem by Padraic Colum
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Kalmuck Bride
I HAVE saddled your white steed, and I have burnished them-
Your belt with crystal clasps, your lance, your scimitar,
Your carbine silver-chased; now ere you mount and ride
Across the sky-wide steppe, a horseman to the war:
A promise make your bride: that at the self-same hour,
Whether you gallop on or halt in some wide mart,
You'll look up at the moon, so round, so full, so bright,
The almost moveless moon, with longing in your heart!
And I beside the tent will gaze and gaze and gaze
Upon the self-same moon that's like the looking-glass
You brought me from the fair of whitened Kadajah,
The present from your hand in which I saw my face.
(Shine, lance and scimitar, shine belt, and shine, carbine,
With magic of the moon I have endued your shine!)
Charmed by that double gaze, the moon that's won unto
The magic I contrive, will mirror my wan face,
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The Poor Girl's Meditation
I AM sitting here
Since the moon rose in the night,
Kindling a fire,
And striving to keep it alight;
The folk of the house are lying
In slumber deep;
The geese will be gabbling soon:
The whole of the land is asleep.
May I never leave this world
Until my ill-luck is gone;
Till I have cows and sheep,
And the lad that I love for my own;
I would not think it long,
The night I would lie at his breast,
And the daughters of spite, after that,
Might say the thing they liked best.
Love takes the place of hate,
If a girl have beauty at all:
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Dedicatory Poem: To George Sigerson, Poet And Scholar
Two men of art, they say, were with the sons
Of Milé,—a poet and a harp player,
When Milé, having taken Ireland, left
The land to his sons’ rule; the poet was
Cir, and fair Cendfind was the harp player.
The sons of Milé for the kingship fought—
(Blithely, with merry sounds, the old poem says)
Eber and Eremon, the sons of Milé
And when division of the land was made
They drew a lot for the two men of art.
With Eber who had won the Northern half
The Harper Cendfind went, and with Eremon
The Northerner, Cir the poet stayed;
And so, the old Book of the Conquests says,
The South has music and the North has lore.
To you who are both of the North and South,
To you who have the music and the lore,
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poem by Padraic Colum
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A Poor Scholar Of The 'Forties
MY eyelids red and heavy arc
With bending o'er the smold'ring peat.
I know the Aeneid now by heart,
My Virgil read in cold and heat,
In loneliness and hunger smart.
And I know Homer, too, I ween,
As Munster poets know Ossian.
And I must walk this road that winds
Twixt bog and bog, while east there lies
A city with its men and books;
With treasures open to the wise,
Heart-words from equals, comrade-looks;
Down here they have but tale and song,
They talk Repeal the whole night long.
'You teach Greek verbs and Latin nouns,'
The dreamer of Young Ireland said,
'You do not hear the muffled call,
The sword being forged, the far-off tread
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poem by Padraic Colum
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