NEW YEAR

New Year is nigh, just three pints away,
What’s new about another twelve hour day?
Just a little step closer to making your way
To splashing about in the ether.
Well wishes and happy and ‘go mbeirimid beo’
A new path to follow, a new way to go.
New resolutions, to melt as the snow
In the gateway manned by Saint Peter. 

This is man’s way of measuring life

With calendar, clock, sun-dial and strife
And regular noon bell of angelus wife
Calling him home to the dinner.
And we thank the ‘Great Nothing’ for seeing another
And think of the old man and suffering mother
Remember the twin, the gone-away brother,
And the priest who was scarcely a sinner.
 
Tomorrow is different, all perfect and new.
We’ll visit the graveyard surrounded by yew
And promise all that which we’re certain to do
All proper and perfect, all pure.
The next day we’ll falter and stumble and doubt,
The old year in and the new year out,
Resolutions me arse, what’s that all about?
An annual load load of manure!

 

 

 

PEARSE DECREED

“We suffer in their coming and their going”

And the certainty of never, ever knowing,
The pleasure’s in the reaping, not the sowing
And we gape and wonder still.
Permanence is shorter than a nod
The bog supplies the heather and the sod
The master educating with a rod
Bending the truant to his sally will.
 
Little future in the past, they say,
I stride alone now, she has gone away.
Better for her; futile the dream to stay,
I’m half as old as Father Time himself.
Permanence, a futile human dream,
What is milk without its halo cream?
Dull the sleep without the mystic dream,
A fairy land bereft of gnome and elf.
 
Nature knows not nature, as man decrees,
On silver wings she flew across the seas,
Faster flew than all the birds and bees
On wings that coaxed the wind to do the flying.
From pocket to socket, the tear of long goodbye,
Feeble friends and nodding kinsfolk sigh,
Watching trail of jet-smoke in the sky,
Useless as a poultice to the dying.
 
I walk alone now, the company is rare,
Futile the smile for she who is not there,
Melting; the leisure, the pleasure and the care
What was, will scarcely be again.
Only man is grateful for the past
Despite the knowledge it could never last
A furnace never worked without a blast
Greedy the man, that wants ten out of ten.

(here's to the honey-pot in Arroyo de la Miel)