Patrick Kavanagh

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

O stony grey soil of
The laugh from my love you thieved;
You took the gay child of my
And gave me your clod-conceived

I have lived in important places,
When great events were decided, who
That half a rood of rock, a no-man's
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims

The bicycles go by in twos and threes -There's a dance in Billy Brennan's barn to-night,
And there's the half-talk code of
And the wink-and-elbow language of delight
Half-past eight and there is not a

Back once again in wild, wet Monaghan Exiled from thought and feeling,
A mean brutality reigns:
It is really a horrible position to be in And I equate myself with Dante And all who have lived outside civilization
It isn't a question...

I do not think of you lying in the wet
Of a Monaghan graveyard;
I
You walking down a lane among the

On an apple-ripe September
Through the mist-chill fields I
With a pitch-fork on my
Less for use than for devilment

Upon a bank I sat, a child made
Of one small primrose flowering in my mind
Better than wealth it is,
I said, to

We borrowed the loan of Kerr's
To go to Dundalk with butter,
Brought him home the evening before the
And exile that night in Mucker

On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue;
I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way,
And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of th...

We are the children of light, Wise, not companioned By goats In a condemned graveyard
Backward blowing Blizzards of memory Flatten out The genealogies
But here a point, The objective essence We work in
We shall not drink from the st...

Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the
Pouring redemption for me, that I
The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal,
Grow with nature again as before I grew