Dick Lumbard

My name is Dick Lumbard,

I'm a Labourer by trade,

I can handle a shovel,

A pick or a spade,

I went into the friget,

A wife for me to find,

And i picked out a beauty,

Although I'm half blind.

----

And the day we are married,

We'll out a great shine,

We'll drive to the ferry,

And then on to Cloyne,

We'll drive down to Farside,

We'll dance on the green,

We'll drive round by Whitegate,

And home to Guileen.

----

When we are married,

We'll make a great start,

We'll keep hens, ducks and chickens,

And a pony and cart,

When we are married,

We'll get on aright,

We'll rob and we'll plunder,

At the dead of the night.

----

When we are married,

We'll get on you bet,

We'll right to John Bull,

For a pension to get,

While others head home,

Doing their work in the fields,

I was riding through France,

With bright spurs on my heals.

----

You know where I live,

At the end of Guileen,

My house it wants thatch,

For to keep out the rain,

It's not very lofty,

You ave seen it before,

Put your hand down the chimney,

And bolt the back door,

The End

Bun Falla 

No mortar holds these stones together,

only the weave of long ago hands

expressing a long ago craft

threads time between now and then.

Tufted wall stubs speak of dereliction,

of unattached voices and footsteps,

of animal hoof and cartwheel echoes

drifted seaward awhile past.

Broken joists of timber, nail rusted joints

Recall the clamour of carpenters, 

Seanachai journeymen perhaps

hopeful of a stitched plate filled with

evening stew and a fistful of  bread.

A Guileen winter breeze rustles iron sheeting.

Plaster clumps dressed in faded wallpapering

the remnants of a day at the city and the dazzle

in a sunlit eye in after years.

Someone who must have walked as I do now

where the sea is forever awash against the cliffs and the rocks.

Someone who listened to the pebbles chuckling, awash upon the shore.

Someone who listened for village men in battleships, shed a tear for

graveyards awash for evermore.

I have stood in graveyards

when the wind whistled,

fearful of old seadogs sawing across the horse waves

of eternity to question me.

And when sea fog enveloped all but the nearest grave slabs

it seemed to me both worlds co-mingled

leaving us directionless and semi-animate,

our movements almost suspended in hesitancy.

But at Bun Falla when the sea fog rolls in,

its vaporous veils cloak-spreading  rising land

to where heathers abound,

I have no sense of such things.

And when the sun burns through on the fair sparkle of a morning’s sea-sky blue

my only sense is of  this landscape, this artwork of what stone masons knew,

man’s ruins now nature’s sculpted display, in uncased splendour presented to the sea.