ΠΑΤΡΙΚ ΚΑΒΑΝΑ!

PATRICK KAVANAGH

MEMORY OF MY FATHER

Every old man I see
Reminds me of my father
When he had fallen in love with death
One time when sheaves were gathered.

That man I saw in Gardiner Street
Stumble on the kerb was one,
He stared at me half-eyed,
I might have been his son. 

And I remember the musician
Faltering over his fiddle
In Bayswater, London.
He too set me the riddle. 

Every old man I see
In October-coloured weather
Seems to say to me
"I was once your father."

ΠΑΤΡΙΚ ΚΑΒΑΝΑ!

PATRICK KAVANAGH

INNOCENCE

They laughed at one I loved –
The triangular hill that hung
Under the Big Forth. They said

That I was bounded by the whitethorn hedges
Of the little farm and did not know the world.
But I knew that love’s doorway to life
Is the same doorway everywhere.

Ashamed of what I loved
I flung her from me and called her a ditch
Although she was smiling at me with violets.

But now I am back in her briary arms;
The dew of an Indian Summer morning lies
On bleached potato-stalks –
What age am I?

I do not know what age I am,
I am no mortal age;
I know nothing of women,
Nothing of cities,
I cannot die
Unless I walk outside these whitethorn hedges.

ΠΑΤΡΙΚ ΚΑΒΑΝΑ!

PATRICK KAVANAGH (1904-1967)


WET EVENING IN APRIL

The birds sang in the wet trees
And I listened to them it was a hundred years from now
And I was dead and someone else was listening to them.
But I was glad I had recorded for him
The melancholy.

ΠΑΤΡΙΚ ΚΑΒΑΝΑ!

PATRICK KAVANAGH (1904-1967)


APRIL DUSK

April dusk
It is tragic to be a poet now
And not a lover
Paradised under the mutest bough.

I look through my window and see
The ghost of life flitting bat-winged.
O I am as old as a sage can even be,
O I am as lonely as the first fool kinged.

The horse in his stall turns away
From the hay-filled manger, dreaming of grass
Soft and cool in hollows. Does he neigh
Jealousy-words for John MacGuigan's ass
That never was civilised in stall or trace.

An unmusical ploughboy whistles down the lane
Not worried at all about the fate of Europe.
While I sit here feeling the subtle pain
Of one whose Tree of God has been uprooted.



Το υλικό της ανάρτησης μάς το έστειλε η εικονιζόμενη φίλη του ιστολογίου κ. Mila Kunis.

ΠΑΤΡΙΚ ΚΑΒΑΝΑ!

PATRICK KAVANAGH (1904-1967)


GOSPEL

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 stink-pots.

Propaganda,
Gospel spread
With tin shovels,
We are this generation.



Το υλικό της ανάρτησης μάς το έστειλε η εικονιζόμενη φίλη του ιστολογίου κ. Summer Rayne Oakes.

ΠΑΤΡΙΚ ΚΑΒΑΝΑ!

PATRICK KAVANAGH (1904-1967)


INNOCENCE

They laughed at one I loved-
The triangular hill that hung
Under the Big Forth. They said
That I was bounded by the whitethorn hedges
Of the little farm and did not know the world.
But I knew that love's doorway to life
Is the same doorway everywhere.
Ashamed of what I loved
I flung her from me and called her a ditch
Although she was smiling at me with violets.

But now I am back in her briary arms
The dew of an Indian Summer lies
On bleached potato-stalks
What age am I?

I do not know what age I am,
I am no mortal age;
I know nothing of women,
Nothing of cities,
I cannot die
Unless I walk outside these whitethorn hedges.



Το υλικό της ανάρτησης μάς το έστειλε η εικονιζόμενη φίλη του ιστολογίου κ. Daizy Gear.

ΠΑΤΡΙΚ ΚΑΒΑΝΑ!

PATRICK KAVANAGH (1904-1967)


SHANCODUFF

My black hills have never seen the sun rising,
Eternally they look north towards Armagh.
Lot's wife would not be salt if she had been
Incurious as my black hills that are happy
When dawn whitens Glassdrummond chapel.

My hills hoard the bright shillings of March
While the sun searches in every pocket.
They are my Alps and I have climbed the Matterhorn
With a sheaf of hay for three perishing calves
In the field under the Big Forth of Rocksavage.

The sleety winds fondle the rushy beards of Shancoduff
While the cattle-drovers sheltering in the Featherna Bush
Look up and say: "Who owns them hungry hills
That the water-hen and snipe must have forsaken?
A poet? Then by heavens he must be poor."
I hear and is my heart not badly shaken?



Το υλικό της ανάρτησης μάς το έστειλε η εικονιζόμενη φίλη του ιστολογίου κ. Andrea Corr.