Irish Poetry for St. Patrick

[Tzara]

You can't have a St. Patrick's day without recitin' some poems in the pub, can you? Let me start with Billy Yeats:

The Circus Animals' Desertion


I

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.

II

What can I but enumerate old themes,
First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose
Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,
Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,
Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,
That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;
But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride.

And then a counter-truth filled out its play,
'The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it;
She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away,
But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.
I thought my dear must her own soul destroy
So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,
And this brought forth a dream and soon enough
This dream itself had all my thought and love.

And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread
Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;
Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.

III

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.​

 

[clutching_calliope]

A Miner's Lullaby (Coorie Doon)

.....

 

[Tzara]

A little different Irish writer.

Roundelay
Samuel Beckett

on all that strand
at end of day
steps sole sound
long sole sound
until unbidden stay
then no sound
on all that strand
long no sound
until unbidden go
steps sole sound
long sole sound
on all that strand
at end of day​

 

[Tathagata]

ON THE SALE BY AUCTION OF KEATS' LOVE LETTERS

Oscar Wilde


These are the letters which Endymion wrote
To one he loved in secret, and apart.
And now the brawlers of the auction mart
Bargain and bid for each poor blotted note,
Ay! for each separate pulse of passion quote
The merchant's price. I think they love not art
Who break the crystal of a poet's heart
That small and sickly eyes may glare and gloat.

Is it not said that many years ago,
In a far Eastern town, some soldiers ran
With torches through the midnight, and began
To wrangle for mean raiment, and to throw
Dice for the garments of a wretched man,
Not knowing the God's wonder, or His woe?

 

[TheRainMan]

Thousands Are Sailing Shane MacGowan


The island it is silent now
but the ghosts still haunt the waves,
and the torch lights up a famished man
who fortune could not save.

Did you work upon the railroad?
Did you rid the streets of crime?
Were your dollars from the white house,
were they from the five and dime?

Did the old songs taunt or cheer you
and did they still make you cry?
Did you count the months and years
or did your teardrops quickly dry?

Ah, no, says he, ’twas not to be,
on a coffin ship I came here.
And I never even got so far
that they could change my name.

Thousands are sailing
across the western ocean,
to a land of opportunity
that some of them will never see.
Fortune prevailing
across the western ocean,
their bellies full,
their spirits free,
they’ll break the chains of poverty.
And they’ll dance.

In Manhattan’s desert twilight,
in the death of afternoon,
we stepped hand in hand on Broadway
like the first man on the moon.

And the blackbird broke the silence
as you whistled it so sweet,
and in Brendan Behan’s footsteps
I danced up and down the street.

Then we said goodnight to Broadway,
giving it our best regards,
tipped our hats to Mister Cohen,
dear old Times Square’s favorite bard.

Then we raised a glass to JFK
and a dozen more besides.
When I got back to my empty room,
I suppose I must have cried.

Thousands are sailing
again across the ocean,
where the hand of opportunity
draws tickets in a lottery.
Postcards we’re mailing
of sky-blue skies and oceans,
from rooms the daylight never sees
where lights don’t glow on christmas trees.
But we dance to the music.
And we dance.

Whereever we go, we celebrate
the land that makes us refugees
from fear of priests with empty plates,
from guilt and weeping effigies.

And we dance.

 

[sugarmountain]

James Joyce

Dear Heart, Why Will You Use Me So?

Dear heart, why will you use me so?
Dear eyes that gently me upbraid,
Still are you beautiful -- - but O,
How is your beauty raimented!

Through the clear mirror of your eyes,
Through the soft sigh of kiss to kiss,
Desolate winds assail with cries
The shadowy garden where love is.

And soon shall love dissolved be
When over us the wild winds blow -- -
But you, dear love, too dear to me,
Alas! why will you use me so?

 

[sugarmountain]

More James Joyce

I Would in That Sweet Bosom Be

I would in that sweet bosom be
(O sweet it is and fair it is!)
Where no rude wind might visit me.
Because of sad austerities
I would in that sweet bosom be.

I would be ever in that heart
(O soft I knock and soft entreat her!)
Where only peace might be my part.
Austerities were all the sweeter
So I were ever in that heart.

 

[sugarmountain]

10 THINGS I DO EVERY DAY
by Ted Berrigan

wake up
smoke pot
see the cat
love my wife
think of Frank

eat lunch
make noises
sing songs
go out
dig the streets

go home for dinner
read the Post
make pee-pee
two kids
grin

read books
see my friends
get pissed-off
have a Pepsi
disappear

 

[sugarmountain]

BUDDHA ON THE BOUNTY
by Ted Berrigan

for Merrill Gilfillan

"A little loving can solve a lot of things"
She locates two spatial equivalents in
The same time continuum. "You are lovely. I
am lame." "Now it's me." "If a man is in
Solitude, the world is translated, my world
& wings sprout from the shoulders of 'The Slave' "
Yeah. I like the fiery butterfly puzzles
Of this pilgrimage toward clarities
Of great mud intelligence & feeling.
"The Elephant is the wisest of all animals
The only one who remembers his former lives
& he remains motionless for long periods of time
Meditating thereon." I'm not here, now,
& it is good, absence.

 

[sugarmountain]

Song- Seamus Heaney

A rowan like a lipsticked girl.
Between the by-road and the main road
Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance
Stand off among the rushes.


There are the mud-flowers of dialect
And the immortelles of perfect pitch
And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens.

 

[sugarmountain]

John Hewitt

Substance and Shadow


There is a bareness in the images
I temper time with in my mind's defence;
they hold their own, their stubborn secrecies;
no use to rage against their reticence:
a gannet's plunge, a heron by a pond,
a last rook homing as the sun goes down,
a spider squatting on a bracken-frond,
and thistles in a cornsheaf's tufted crown,
a boulder on a hillside, lichen-stained,
the sparks of sun on dripping icicles,
their durable significance contained
in texture, colour, shape, and nothing else.
All these are sharp, spare, simple, native to
this small republic I have charted out
as the sure acre where my sense is true,
while round its boundaries sprawl the screes of doubt.

My lamp lights up the kettle on the stove
and throws its shadow on the whitewashed wall,
like some Assyrian profile with, above,
a snake, or bird-prowed helmet crested tall;
but this remains a shadow; when I shift
the lamp or move the kettle is gone,
the substance and the shadow break adrift
that needed bronze to lock them, bronze or stone.

 

[sugarmountain]

The Travail Of Passion
William Butler Yeats

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When the flaming lute-thronged angelic door is wide;
When an immortal passion breathes in mortal clay;
Our hearts endure the scourge, the plaited thorns, the way
Crowded with bitter faces, the wounds in palm and side,
The vinegar-heavy sponge, the flowers by Kedron stream;
We will bend down and loosen our hair over you,
That it may drop faint perfume, and be heavy with dew,
Lilies of death-pale hope, roses of passionate dream.