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The Great Hunger

Clay is the word and clay is the

Where the potato-gatherers like mechanised scarecrows

Along the side-fall of the hill - Maguire and his men.

If we watch them an hour is there anything we can

Of life as it is broken-backed over the

Of Death?

Here crows gabble over worms and

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

Loved the light and the

Too long virgin?

Yesterday was summer.  Who was it promised marriage to

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

Rolls down the side of the hill, diverted by the

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, trailingA rusty plough.

Three heads hanging between wide-apart legs.

October playing a symphony on a slack wire paling.

Maguire watches the drills flattened

And the flints that lit a candle for him on a June

Flameless.

The drills slipped by and the days slipped

And he trembled his head away and ran free from the world's halter,

And thought himself wiser than any man in the

When he laughed over pints of

Of how he came free from every net

In the gaps of experience.

He shook a knowing

And pretended to his

That children are tedious in hurrying fields of

Where men are spanning across wide furrows.

Lost in the passion that never needs a

The pricks that pricked were the pointed pins of harrows.

Children scream so loud that the crows could

The seed of an acre away with crow-rude jeers.

Patrick Maguire, he called his dog and he flung a stone in the

And 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

Than his mud-gloved fingers probe in this insensitive hair.'Move forward the basket and balance it

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

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

Out in my clover?

Curse o'

Where is that dog?.

Never where he's wanted' Maguire grunts and

Through a clay-wattled moustache and stares about him from the height.

His dream changes like the cloud-swung

And he is not so sure now if his mother was

When she praised the man who made a field his bride.

Watch him, watch him, that man on a hill whose

Is a wet sack flapping about the knees of time.

He lives that his little fields may stay fertile when his own

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

The cry of fillies in season.

He could not

The easy road to destiny.

He

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

And ditches straight.

No monster hand lifted up children and put down

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

Darts like a frightened robin, and the

Shows the green of after-grass through a little window,

And he knows that his own heart is calling his mother a

God's truth is life - even the grotesque shapes of his foulest fire.

The horse lifts its head and

Through the whins and

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

The poignant light in puddles shaped by hooves.

Come with me,

Imagination, into this iron

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.

Maguiire was faithful to death:

He stayed with his mother till she

At the age of ninety-one.

She stayed too long,

Wife and mother in one.

When she

The knuckle-bones were cutting the skin of her son's

And he was sixty-five.

O he loved his

Above all others.

O he loved his

And he loved his

And his happiest

Was to clean his

With perennial

On the bank of some summer stream;

To smoke his

In a sheltered

In the middle of July.

His face in a

And two stones in his

And an impotent worm on his thigh.

But his passion became a

For he grew feeble bringing the

Women of his mind to lust nearness,

Once a week at least flesh must make an appearance.

So Maguire got

Of the no-target gun

And returned to his headland of carrots and

To the fields once

Where eunuchs can be

And life is more lousy than savage.

II .

Poor Paddy Maguire, a fourteen-hour

He worked for years.

It was he that lit the

And boiled the kettle and gave the cows their hay.

His mother tall hard as a Protestant

Came down the stairs barefoot at the

And talked to her son sharply:  'Did you

The hens out, you?' She had a venomous

And a wizened face like moth-eaten leatherette.

Two black cats peeped between the

And gloated over the bacon-fizzling pan.

Outside the window showed tin canisters.

The snipe of Dawn fell like a whirring

And Patrick on a headland stood alone.

The pull is on the traces, it is

And a cold black wind is blowing from Dundalk.

The twisting sod rolls over on her

The virgin screams before the irresistible sock.

No worry on Maguire's mind this

Except that he forgot to bring his matches.'Hop back there Polly, hoy back, woa, wae,

From every second hill a neighbour

With all the sharpened interest of rivalry.

Yet sometimes when the sun comes through a

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

At Easter from the sealed and guarded tomb.

Primroses and the unearthly start of

Among the blackthorn shadows in the ditch,

A dead sparrow and an old waistcoat.

Maguire

As the horses turn slowly round the which is

Of love and fear and things half born to

He stands between the plough-handles and he

At the end of a long furrow his name

Among the poets, prostitutes.

With all

He is one.

Here  with the

Who for half-moments of

Pay out good days and wait and

For sunlight-woven cloaks.

O to be

As Respectability that knows the price of all

And marks God's truth in pounds and pence and farthings.

April, and no one able to

How far it is to harvest.

They put

The seeds blindly with sensuous groping

And sensual dreams sleep dreams subtly underground.

Tomorrow is Wednesday  - who cares?'Remember Eileen Farrelly?

I was thinkingA man might do a damned sight worse …' That voice is

Through a hole in a garden wall -And who was Eileen now cannot be known.

The cattle are out on

The corn is coming up evenly.

The farm folk are hurrying to catch Mass:

Christ will meet them at the end of the world, the slow and the speedier.

But the fields say: only Time can bless.

Maguire knelt beside a pillar where he could

Without being seen.

He turned an old prayer round:'Jesus,

Mary,

Joseph pray for

Now and at the Hour.' Heaven dazzled death.'Wonder should I cross-plough that turnip-ground.'The tension broke.

The congregation lifted it

As one man and coughed in unison.

Five hundred hearts were hungry for life-Who lives in Christ shall never die the death.

And the candle-lit Altar and the

And the pregnant Tabernacle lifted a moment to

Out of the clayey

Maguire sprinkled his face with holy

As the congregation stood up for the Last Gospel.

He rubbed the dust off his knees with his palm, and

Coughed the prayer phlegm up from his throat and sighed:

Amen.

Once one day in June when he was

Among his cattle in the Yellow

He met a girl carrying a

And he was then a young and heated fellow.

Too earnest, too earnest!

He rushed beyond the

To the unreal.

And he saw

Written in letters larger than John Bunyan dreamt of.

For the strangled impulse there is no redemption.

And that girl was gone and he was

The dangers in the fields where love

He was helpless.

He saw his

And stroked their flanks in lieu of wife to handle.

He would have changed the circle if he could,

The circle that was the grass track where he ran.

Twenty times a day he ran round the

And still there was no winning-post where the runner is cheered home.

Desperately he broke the tune,

But however he tried always the same melody lept up from the background,

The dragging step of a ploughman going home through the

Headlands under an April-watery moon.

Religion, the fields and the fear of the

And Ignorance giving him the coward's blow,

He dared not rise to pluck the

From the fruited Tree of Life.

He bowed his

And saw a wet weed twined about his toe.

Evening at the cross-roads -Heavy heads nodding out words as

As the ruminations of cows after milking.

From the ragged road surface a boy picks upA piece of gravel and stares at it-and

Tosses it across the elm tree on to the railway.

He means nothing.

Not a damn

Somebody is coming over the metal railway

And his hobnailed boots on the arches sound like a

Calling men awake.

But the bridge is too narrow -The men lift their heads a moment.

That was only John,

So they dream on.

Night in the elms, night in the grass.

O we are too tired to go home yet.

Two cyclists

Talking loudly of Kitty and Molly?

Horses or women? wisdom or folly?

A door closes on an evicted

Where prayers begin in Barney Meegan's kitchen :

Rosie curses the cat between her devotions;

The daughter prays that she may have three wishes -Health and wealth and love -From the fairy who is  faith or hope or compounds of.

At the cross-roads the crowd had thinned out:

Last words were uttered.

There is no to-morrow;

No future but only time stretched for the mowing of the

Or putting an axle in the turf-barrow.

Patrick Maguire went home and made

And broke a chunk off the loaf of wheaten bread;

His mother called down to him to look

And make sure that the hen-house was locked.

His sister grunted in

The sound of a sow taking up a new position.

Pat opened his trousers wide over the

And dreamt himself to lewd sleepiness.

The clock ticked on.

Time passes.

Health and wealth and love he too dreamed of in

As he sat on the railway slope and watched the children of the

Picking up a primrose here and a daisy there -They were picking up life's truth singly.

But he dreamt of the Absolute envased bouquet

Il or nothing.

And it was nothing.

For God is not

In one place,

Till Hope comes in and takes it on his shoulder -O Christ, that is what you have done for us:

In a crumb of bread the whole mystery is.

He read the symbol too sharply and

From the five simple doors of

To the door whose combination lock has

Philosopher and priest and common dunce.

Men build their heavens as they build their

Of friends.

God is in the bits and pieces of Everyday -A kiss here and a laugh again, and sometimes tears,

A pearl necklace round the neck of poverty.

He sat on the railway slope and watched the evening,

Too beautifully perfect to use,

And his three wishes were three stones too sharp to sit on,

Too hard to carve.

Three frozen idols of a speechless muse.

II'Now go to Mass and pray and confess your

And you'll have all the luck,' his mother said.

He listened to the lie that is a woman's

Around a conscience when soft thighs are spread.

And all the while she was setting up the

She trusted in Nature that never deceives.

But her son took it as literal truth.

Religion's walls expand to the push of nature.

Morality

To sense - but not in little tillage fields.

Life went on like that.

One summer

Again through a hay-field on her way to the shop -The grass was wet and over-leaned the path -And Agnes held her skirts sensationally up,

And not because the grass was wet either.

A man was watching her,

Patrick Maguire.

She was in love with passion and its

And the wet grass could never cool the

That radiated from her unwanted womb in that metaphysical

Where flesh was thought more spiritual than

Among the stars - out of reach of the peasant's hand.

Ah, but the priest was one of the people too -A farmers son - and surely he

The needs of a brother and sister.

Religion could not be a counter-irritant like a blister,

But the certain standard, measured and

By which man might re-make his soul though all walls were

And all earth's pedestalled gods thrown.

Sitting on a wooden gate,

Sitting on a wooden gate,

Sitting on a wooden

He didn't care a damn.

Said whatever came into his head,

Said whatever came into his head,

Said whatever came into his

And inconsequently sang.

While his world withered away,

He had a cigarette to smoke and a pound to

On drink the next Saturday.

His cattle were

And his horses all

Midsummer grass could make them.

The young women ran

And dreamed of a

Joy dreams though the fathers might forsake

But no one would take them;

No man could ever

That their skirts had loosed buttons,

O the men were as blind as could be.

And Patrick

From his. purgatory

Called the gods of the Christian to

That this twisted

Was the necessary

And not the rope that was strangling true love.

But sitting on a wooden

Sometime in

When he was thirty-four or

He gloried in the lie:

He made it read the way it should,

He made life read the evil

While he cursed the ascetic

Without knowing why.

Sitting on a wooden

All, all

He sang and

Like a man quite daft,

Or like a man on a channel

He fantasied forth his groan.

Sitting on a wooden gate,

Sitting on a wooden gate,

Sitting on a wooden

He rode in day-dream cars.

He locked his body with his

When the gate swung too much in the breeze.

But while he caught high

Life slipped between the bars.

He gave himself another year,

Something was bound to happen before then -The circle would break

And he would carve the new one to his own will.

A new rhythm is a new

And in it marriage is hung and money.

He would be a new man walking through unbroken

Of dawn in the year of One.

The poor peasant talking to himself in a stable

An ignorant peasant deep in dung.

What can the passers-by think otherwise?

Where is his silver bowl of knowledge hung?

Why should men be asked to believe in a

That is only the mark of a hoof in guttery gaps?

A man is what is written on the label.

And the passing world stares but no one

To look closer.

So back to the growing

And the ridges he never loved.

Nobody will ever know how much tortured poetry the pulled weeds on the ridge

Before they withered in the July sun,

Nobody will ever read the wild, sprawling, scrawling mad woman's signature,

The hysteria and the boredom of the enclosed nun of his thought.

Like the afterbirth of a cow stretched on a branch in the

Life dried in the veins of these women and men:'The grey and grief and unloved,

The bones in the backs of their hands,

And the chapel pressing its low ceiling over them.

Sometimes they did laugh and see the sunlight,

A narrow slice of divine instruction.

Going along the river at the bend of

The trout played in the pools

To jump in love though death bait the hook.

And there would be girls sitting on the grass banks of lanes.

Stretch-legged and lingering staring -A man might take one of them if he had the courage.

But 'No' was in every sentence of their

Except when the public-house came in and shouted its piece.

The yellow buttercups and the bluebells among the whin

On rocks in the middle of

Was a bright spoke in the

Of the peasant's mill.

The goldfinches on the railway paling were worth looking at -A man might imagine

Himself in Brazil and these birds the birds of

And the Amazon and the romance traced on the school map lived again.

Talk in evening corners and under

Was like an old book found in a king's tomb.

The children gathered round like students and

And some of the saga defied the draught in the open

And was not blown.

Their intellectual life consisted in

Reynolds News or the Sunday Dispatch,

With sometimes an old almanac brought down from the

Or a school reader brown with the droppings of thatch.

The sporting results or the headlines of

Was a humbug profound as the highbrow's Arcana.

Pat tried to be wise to the abstraction of all

But its secret dribbled down his waistcoat like a drink from a strainer.

He wagered a bob each way on the Derby,

He got a straight tip from a man in a shop -A double from the Guineas it was and thought himselfA master mathematician when one of them came

And he could explain how much he'd have

On the double if the second leg had followed the first.

He was betting on form and breeding, he claimed,

And the man that did that could never be burst.

After that they went on to the war, and the

On both sides were shown to be stupid as hell.

If he'd taken that road, they remarked of a Marshal,

He'd have … O they know their geography

This was their university.

Maguire was an

Who dreamed from his lowly position of

To a professorship like Larry

Kenna or

Or the pig-gelder Nallon whose knowledge was amazing.'A treble, full multiple odds … That's flat porter …Another one … No, you're wrong about that thing I was telling you. .

Did you part with your filly,

Jack?

I heard that you sold her.…'The students were all savants by the time of pub-close.

IA year passed and another hurried after

And Patrick Maguire was still six months behind life -His mother six months ahead of it;

His sister straddle-legged across it: -One leg in hell and the other in

And between the purgatory of middle-aged virginity -She prayed for release to heaven or hell.

His mother's voice grew thinner like a rust-worn

But it cut venomously as it thinned,

It cut him up the middle till he became more woman than man,

And it cut through to his mind before the end.

Another field whitened in the April

And the harrows rattled over the seed.

He gathered the loose stones off the ridges

And grumbled to his men to hurry.

He looked like a man who could give

To foolish young fellows.

He was forty-seven,

And there was depth in his jaw and his voice was the voice of a great cattle-dealer,

A man with whom the fair-green gods break even.'I think I ploughed that lea the proper depth,

She ought to give a crop if any land gives …Drive slower with the foal-mare,

Joe.'Joe, a young man of imagined wives,

Smiles to himself and answered like a slave:'You needn't fear or fret.

I'm taking her as easy, as easy as …Easy there Fanny, easy, pet.'They loaded the day-scoured implements on the

As the shadows of poplars crookened the furrows.

It was the evening, evening.

Patrick was forgetting to be

As he used to be in Aprils long ago.

It was the menopause, the misery-pause.

The schoolgirls passed his house laughing every

And sometimes they spoke to him familiarly -He had an idea.

Schoolgirls of

Would see no political intrigue in an old man's friendship.

The heifer waiting to be nosed by the old bull.

That notion passed too - there was the danger of

And jails are narrower than the five-sod

And colder than the black hills facing Armagh in February.

He sinned over the warm ashes again and his

The law's long arm could not serve with time.

His face set like an old judge's pose:

Respectability and righteousness,

Stand for no nonsense.

The priest from the altar called Patrick Maguire's

To hold the collecting-box in the chapel

During all the Sundays of May.

His neighbours envied him his holy rise,

But he walked down from the church with affected

And took the measure of heaven angle-wise.

He still could laugh and sing,

But not the wild laugh or the abandoned harmony

That called the world to new silliness from the top of a wooden

When thirty-five could take the sparrow's bow.

Let us be kind, let us be kind and sympathetic:

Maybe life is not for joking or for finding happiness in -This tiny light in Oriental

Looking out chance windows of poetry or prayer.

And the grief and defeat of men like these

Is God's way - maybe - and we must not want too

To see.

The twisted thread is stronger than the wind-swept fleece.

And in the end who shall rest in truth's high peace?

Or whose is the world now, even now?

O let us kneel where the blind ploughman

And learn to live without

In a mud-walled space -Illiterate unknown and unknowing.

Let us kneel where he

And feel what he feels.

One day he saw a daisy and he thought

Reminded him of his childhood -He stopped his cart to look at it.

Was there a fairy hiding behind it?

He helped a poor woman whose

Had died on her;

He dragged home a drunken man on a winter's

And one rare moment he heard the young people playing on the railway

And he wished them happiness and whatever they most desired from life.

He saw the sunlight and begrudged no

His share of what the miserly soil and

Gives in a season to a ploughman.

And he cried for his own loss one late night on the

And yet thanked the God who had arranged these things.

Was he then a saint?

A Matt Talbot of Monaghan?

His sister Mary Anne spat poison at the

Who sometimes came to the door selling raffle

For holy funds.'Get out, you little tramps!' she would

As she shook to the hens an armful of crumbs,

But Patrick often put his hand deep

In his trouser-pocket and fingered out a

Or maybe a tobacco-stained caramel.'You're soft,' said the sister; 'with other people's

It's not a bit funny.'The cards are shuffled and the

Laid flat for cutting - Tom

Cut for trump.

I think we'll

This game, the last, a tanner one.

Hearts.

Right.

I see you're

Your two-year-old.

Play quick,

Maguire,

The clock there says it's half-past ten -Kate, throw another sod on that fire.

One of the card-players laughs and

Into the flame across a shoulder.

Outside, a noise like a

Among the hen-roosts.

The cock crows

The frosted townland of the night.

Eleven o'clock and still the

Goes on and the players seem to

Drunk in an Orient opium den.

Midnight, one o'clock, two.

Somebody's leg has fallen asleep.

What about home?

Maguire, are

Using your double-tree this week?

Why? do you want it?

Play the ace.

There's it, and that's the last card for me.

A wonderful night, we had.

Duffy's

Is very convenient.

Is that a ghost or a tree?

And so they go home with dragging

And their voices rumble like laden carts.

And they are happy as the dead or sleeping …I should have led that ace of hearts.

The fields were bleached white,

The wooden tubs full of

Were white in the

That blew through Brannagan's Gap on their way from Siberia;

The cows on the grassless heights .

Followed the hay that had wings -The February fodder that hung itself on the black

Of the hill-top hedge.

A man stood beside a

And clapped his

And pranced on the crisp

And shouted to warm himself.

Then he buck-leaped about the

And scooped them into a basket.

He looked like a bucking

Whose spine was being tickled.

Sometimes he stared across the

And sometimes he straightened his back and vaguely whistledA tune that weakened his

And saddened his terrier dog's.

A neighbour passed with a spade on his

And Patrick Maguire bent like a

Whistled-good morning under his

And the man the other side of the

Champed his spade on the road at his

And talked an old

While the wind blew under his clothes.

The mother sickened and stayed in bed all day,

Her head hardly dented the pillow, so light and thin it had worn,

But she still enquired after the household affairs.

She held the strings of her children's Punch and Judy, and when a mouth

It was her truth that the dolls would have

If they hadn't been made of wood and tin -'Did you open the barn door,

Pat, to let the young calves in?'The priest called to see her every

And she told him her troubles and fears:'If Mary Anne was settled I'd die in peace -I'm getting on in years.''You were a good woman,' said the priest,'And your children will miss you when you're gone.

The likes of you this parish never knew,

I'm sure they'll not forget the work you've done.'She reached five bony crooks under the tick -'Five pounds for Masses - won't you say them quick.'She died one morning in the beginning of

And a shower of sparrow-notes was the litany for her dying.

The holy water was sprinkled on the

And her children stood around the bed and cried because it was too late for crying.

A mother dead!

The tired sentiment:'Mother,

Mother' was a shallow

Where sorrow hardly could wash its feet …Mary Anne came away from the deathbed and boiled the calves their gruel.'O what was I doing when the procession passed?

Where was I looking?

Young women and

And I might have joined them.

Who bent the coin of my

That it stuck in the slot?

I remember a night we

Through the moon of Donaghmoyne,

Four of us seeking adventure,

It was midsummer forty years ago.

Now I

The moment that gave the turn to my life.

O Christ!

I am locked in a stable with pigs and cows for ever.

The world looks

And talks of the peasant:

The peasant has no worries;

In his little lyrical fields He ploughs and sows;

He eats fresh food,

He loves fresh women,

He is his own

As it was in the

The simpleness of peasant life.

The birds that sing for him are eternal choirs ,

Everywhere he walks there are flowers.

His heart is pure,

His mind is clear,

He can talk to God as Moses and Isaiah

The peasant who is only one remove from the beasts he drives. '"The travellers stop their cars to gape over the green bank into his fields: -There is the source from which all cultures rise,

And all religions,

There is the pool in which the poet

And the musician.

Without the peasant base civilisation must die,

Unless the clay is in the mouth the singer's singing is useless.

The travellers touch the roots of the grass and feel

When they grasp the steering wheels again.

The peasant is the unspoiled child of Prophecy,

The peasant is all virtues - let us salute him without

The peasant ploughman who is half a vegetable -Who can react to sun and rain and sometimes

Regret that the Maker of Light had not touched him more intensely.

Brought him up from the sub-soil to an

Of conscious joy.

He was not born blind.

He is not always blind: sometimes the cataract

To sudden stone-falling or the desire to breed.

The girls pass along the

And he can remember what man is,

But there is nothing he can do.

Is there nothing he can do?

Is there no escape?

No escape, no escape.

The cows and horses breed,

And the

Gives a bud and a root and

In the good mother's way with her sons;

The fledged bird is

From the nest - on its own.

But the peasant in his little acres is

To a mother's womb by the wind-toughened

Like a goat tethered to the stump of a tree -He circles around and around wondering why it should be.

No crash,

No drama.

That was how his life happened.

No mad hooves galloping in the sky,

But the weak, washy way of true tragedy -A sick horse nosing around the meadow for a clean place to die.

We may come out in the October reality,

Imagination,

The sleety wind no longer slants to the black hill where

And his men are now collecting the scattered harness and baskets.

The dog sitting on a wisp of dry

Watches them through the shadows.'Back in, back in.' One talks to the horse as to a brother.

Maguire himself is patting a potato-pit against the weather -An old man fondling a new-piled grave:'Joe,

I hope you didn't forget to hide the spade .

For there's rogues in the townland.

Hide it flat in a furrow.

I think we ought to be finished by to-morrow.

Their voices through the darkness sound like voices from a cave,

A dull thudding far away, futile, feeble, far away,

First cousins to the ghosts of the townland.

A light stands in a window.

Mary

Has the table set and the tea-pot waiting in the ashes.

She goes to the door and listens and then she

From the top of the haggard-wall :'What's keeping

And the cows to be milked and all the other work there's to do?''All right, all

We'll not stay here all night 'Applause, applause,

The curtain falls.

Applause,

From the homing carts and the

And the bawling cows at the gates.

From the screeching

And the mill-race heavy with the Lammas floods curving over the weirA train at the station blowing off

And the hysterical laughter of the defeated everywhere.

Night, and the futile cards are shuffled again.

Maguire spreads his legs over the impotent cinders that wake no manhood

And he hardly looks to see which card is trump.

His sister tightens her legs and her lips and frizzles

Like the wick of an oil-less lamp.

The curtain falls -Applause, applause.

Maguire is not afraid of death, the Church will light him a

To see his way through the vaults and he'll understand

Quality of the clay that dribbles over his coffin.

He'll know the names of the roots that climb down to tickle his feet.

And he will feel no different than when he walked through Donaghmoyne.

If he stretches out a hand - a wet clod,

If he opens his nostrils - a dungy smell;

If he opens his eyes once in a million years -Through a crack in the crust of the earth he may see a face nodding

Or a woman's legs.

Shut them again for that sight is sin.

He will hardly remember that life happened to him -Something was brighter a moment.

Somebody sang in the distanceA procession passed down a mesmerized street.

He remembers names like Easter and

By colour his fields were.

Maybe he will be born again, a bird of an angel's

To sing the gospel of

To a music as flighty

As a tune on an oboe.

And the serious look of his fields will have changed to the leer of a hobo.

Swaggering celestially home to his three wishes granted.

Will that be? will that be?

Or is the earth right that laughs

And does not

In an unearthly law.

The earth that says:

Patrick Maguire, the old peasant, can neither be damned nor glorified:

The graveyard in which he will lie will be just a deep-drilled

Where the seed gets no chance to come

To the fun of the sun.

The tongue in his mouth is the root of a yew.

Silence, silence.

The story is done.

He stands in the doorway of his houseA ragged sculpture of the wind,

October creaks the rotted mattress,

The bedposts fall.

No hope.

No lust.

The hungry

Screams the apocalypse of

In every corner of this land.

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Patrick Kavanagh

Patrick Kavanagh (21 October 1904 – 30 November 1967) was an Irish poet and novelist. His best-known works include the novel Tarry Flynn, and th…

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