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Patrick Kavanagh - The Great Hunger
Work rating: Medium

	I
	Clay is the word and clay is the flesh
	Where the potato-gatherers like mechanised scarecrows move
	Along the side-fall of the hill - Maguire and his men.
	If we watch them an hour is there anything we can prove
	Of life as it is broken-backed over the Book
	Of Death? Here crows gabble over worms and frogs
	And the gulls like old newspapers are blown clear of the hedges, luckily.
	Is there some light of imagination in these wet clods?
	Or why do we stand here shivering?
	Which of these men
	Loved the light and the queen
	Too long virgin? Yesterday was summer.  Who was it promised marriage to himself
	Before apples were hung from the ceilings for Hallowe`en?
	We will wait and watch the tragedy to the last curtain,
	Till the last soul passively like a bag of wet clay
	Rolls down the side of the hill, diverted by the angles
	Where the plough missed or a spade stands, straitening the way.
	A dog lying on a torn jacket under a heeled-up cart,
	A horse nosing along the posied headland, trailing
	A rusty plough. Three heads hanging between wide-apart legs.
	October playing a symphony on a slack wire paling.
	Maguire watches the drills flattened out
	And the flints that lit a candle for him on a June altar
	Flameless. The drills slipped by and the days slipped by
	And he trembled his head away and ran free from the world`s halter,
	And thought himself wiser than any man in the townland
	When he laughed over pints of porter
	Of how he came free from every net spread
	In the gaps of experience. He shook a knowing head
	And pretended to his soul
	That children are tedious in hurrying fields of April
	Where men are spanning across wide furrows.
	Lost in the passion that never needs a wife
	The pricks that pricked were the pointed pins of harrows.
	Children scream so loud that the crows could bring
	The seed of an acre away with crow-rude jeers.
	Patrick Maguire, he called his dog and he flung a stone in the air
	And hallooed the birds away that were the birds of the years.
	Turn over the weedy clods and tease out the tangled skeins.
	What is he looking for there?
	He thinks it is a potato, but we know better
	Than his mud-gloved fingers probe in this insensitive hair.
	`Move forward the basket and balance it steady
	In this hollow. Pull down the shafts of that cart, Joe,
	And straddle the horse,` Maguire calls.
	`The wind`s over Brannagan`s, now that means rain.
	Graip up some withered stalks and see that no potato falls
	Over the tail-board going down the ruckety pass -
	And that`s a job we`ll have to do in December,
	Gravel it and build a kerb on the bog-side. Is that Cassidy`s ass
	Out in my clover? Curse o` God
	Where is that dog?.
	Never where he`s wanted` Maguire grunts and spits
	Through a clay-wattled moustache and stares about him from the height.
	His dream changes like the cloud-swung wind
	And he is not so sure now if his mother was right
	When she praised the man who made a field his bride.
	Watch him, watch him, that man on a hill whose spirit
	Is a wet sack flapping about the knees of time.
	He lives that his little fields may stay fertile when his own body
	Is spread in the bottom of a ditch under two coulters crossed in Christ`s Name.
	He was suspicious in his youth as a rat near strange bread,
	When girls laughed; when they screamed he knew that meant
	The cry of fillies in season. He could not walk
	The easy road to destiny. He dreamt
	The innocence of young brambles to hooked treachery.
	O the grip, O the grip of irregular fields! No man escapes.
	It could not be that back of the hills love was free
	And ditches straight.
	No monster hand lifted up children and put down apes
	As here.
	      `O God if I had been wiser!`
	That was his sigh like the brown breeze in the thistles.
	He looks, towards his house and haggard. `O God if I had been wiser!`
	But now a crumpled leaf from the whitethorn bushes
	Darts like a frightened robin, and the fence
	Shows the green of after-grass through a little window,
	And he knows that his own heart is calling his mother a liar
	God`s truth is life - even the grotesque shapes of his foulest fire.
	The horse lifts its head and cranes
	Through the whins and stones
	To lip late passion in the crawling clover.
	In the gap there`s a bush weighted with boulders like morality,
	The fools of life bleed if they climb over.
	The wind leans from Brady`s, and the coltsfoot leaves are holed with rust,
	Rain fills the cart-tracks and the sole-plate grooves;
	A yellow sun reflects in Donaghmoyne
	The poignant light in puddles shaped by hooves.
	Come with me, Imagination, into this iron house
	And we will watch from the doorway the years run back,
	And we will know what a peasant`s left hand wrote on the page.
	Be easy, October. No cackle hen, horse neigh, tree sough, duck quack.

	II
	Maguiire was faithful to death:
	He stayed with his mother till she died
	At the age of ninety-one.
	She stayed too long,
	Wife and mother in one.
	When she died
	The knuckle-bones were cutting the skin of her son`s backside
	And he was sixty-five.
	O he loved his mother
	Above all others.
	O he loved his ploughs
	And he loved his  cows
	And his happiest dream
	Was to clean his arse
	With perennial grass
	On the bank of some summer stream;
	To smoke his pipe
	In a sheltered gripe
	In the middle of July.
	His face in a mist
	And two stones in his fist
	And an impotent worm on his thigh.
	But his passion became a plague
	For he grew feeble bringing the vague
	Women of his mind to lust nearness,
	Once a week at least flesh must make an appearance.
	So Maguire got tired
	Of the no-target gun fired
	And returned to his headland of carrots and cabbage
	To the fields once again
	Where eunuchs can be men
	And life is more lousy than savage.

	III .
	Poor Paddy Maguire, a fourteen-hour day
	He worked for years. It was he that lit the fire
	And boiled the kettle and gave the cows their hay.
	His mother tall hard as a Protestant spire
	Came down the stairs barefoot at the kettle-call
	And talked to her son sharply:  `Did you let
	The hens out, you?` She had a venomous drawl
	And a wizened face like moth-eaten leatherette.
	Two black cats peeped between the banisters
	And gloated over the bacon-fizzling pan.
	Outside the window showed tin canisters.
	The snipe of Dawn fell like a whirring stone
	And Patrick on a headland stood alone.
	The pull is on the traces, it is March
	And a cold black wind is blowing from Dundalk.
	The twisting sod rolls over on her back
	The virgin screams before the irresistible sock.
	No worry on Maguire`s mind this day
	Except that he forgot to bring his matches.
	`Hop back there Polly, hoy back, woa, wae,
	From every second hill a neighbour watches
	With all the sharpened interest of rivalry.
	Yet sometimes when the sun comes through a gap
	These men know God the Father in a tree:
	The Holy Spirit is the rising sap,
	And Christ will be the green leaves that will come
	At Easter from the sealed and guarded tomb.
	Primroses and the unearthly start of ferns
	Among the blackthorn shadows in the ditch,
	A dead sparrow and an old waistcoat. Maguire learns
	As the horses turn slowly round the which is which
	Of love and fear and things half born to mind
	He stands between the plough-handles and he sees
	At the end of a long furrow his name signed
	Among the poets, prostitutes. With all miseries
	He is one. Here  with the unfortunate
	Who for half-moments of paradise
	Pay out good days and wait and wait
	For sunlight-woven cloaks. O to be wise
	As Respectability that knows the price of all things
	And marks God`s truth in pounds and pence and farthings.

	IV
	April, and no one able to calculate
	How far it is to harvest. They put down
	The seeds blindly with sensuous groping fingers
	And sensual dreams sleep dreams subtly underground.
	Tomorrow is Wednesday  - who cares?
	`Remember Eileen Farrelly? I was thinking
	A man might do a damned sight worse …` That voice is blown
	Through a hole in a garden wall -
	And who was Eileen now cannot be known.
	The cattle are out on grass
	The corn is coming up evenly.
	The farm folk are hurrying to catch Mass:
	Christ will meet them at the end of the world, the slow and the speedier.
	But the fields say: only Time can bless.
	Maguire knelt beside a pillar where he could spit
	Without being seen. He turned an old prayer round:
	`Jesus, Mary, Joseph pray for us
	Now and at the Hour.` Heaven dazzled death.
	`Wonder should I cross-plough that turnip-ground.`
	The tension broke. The congregation lifted it head
	As one man and coughed in unison.
	Five hundred hearts were hungry for life-
	Who lives in Christ shall never die the death.
	And the candle-lit Altar and the flowers
	And the pregnant Tabernacle lifted a moment to Prophecy
	Out of the clayey hours
	Maguire sprinkled his face with holy water
	As the congregation stood up for the Last Gospel.
	He rubbed the dust off his knees with his palm, and then
	Coughed the prayer phlegm up from his throat and sighed: Amen.
	Once one day in June when he was walking
	Among his cattle in the Yellow Meadow
	He met a girl carrying a basket
	And he was then a young and heated fellow.
	Too earnest, too earnest! He rushed beyond the thing
	To the unreal. And he saw Sin
	Written in letters larger than John Bunyan dreamt of.
	For the strangled impulse there is no redemption.
	And that girl was gone and he was counting
	The dangers in the fields where love ranted
	He was helpless. He saw his cattle
	And stroked their flanks in lieu of wife to handle.
	He would have changed the circle if he could,
	The circle that was the grass track where he ran.
	Twenty times a day he ran round the field
	And still there was no winning-post where the runner is cheered home.
	Desperately he broke the tune,
	But however he tried always the same melody lept up from the background,
	The dragging step of a ploughman going home through the guttery
	Headlands under an April-watery moon.
	Religion, the fields and the fear of the Lord
	And Ignorance giving him the coward`s blow,
	He dared not rise to pluck the fantasies
	From the fruited Tree of Life. He bowed his head
	And saw a wet weed twined about his toe.

	V
	Evening at the cross-roads -
	Heavy heads nodding out words as wise
	As the ruminations of cows after milking.
	From the ragged road surface a boy picks up
	A piece of gravel and stares at it-and then
	Tosses it across the elm tree on to the railway.
	He means nothing.
	Not a damn thing
	Somebody is coming over the metal railway bridge
	And his hobnailed boots on the arches sound like a gong
	Calling men awake. But the bridge is too narrow -
	The men lift their heads a moment. That was only John,
	So they dream on.
	Night in the elms, night in the grass.
	O we are too tired to go home yet. Two cyclists pass
	Talking loudly of Kitty and Molly?
	Horses or women? wisdom or folly?
	A door closes on an evicted dog
	Where prayers begin in Barney Meegan`s kitchen :
	Rosie curses the cat between her devotions;
	The daughter prays that she may have three wishes -
	Health and wealth and love -
	From the fairy who is  faith or hope or compounds of.
	At the cross-roads the crowd had thinned out:
	Last words were uttered. There is no to-morrow;
	No future but only time stretched for the mowing of the hay
	Or putting an axle in the turf-barrow.
	Patrick Maguire went home and made cocoa
	And broke a chunk off the loaf of wheaten bread;
	His mother called down to him to look again
	And make sure that the hen-house was locked. His sister grunted in bed
	The sound of a sow taking up a new position.
	Pat opened his trousers wide over the ashes
	And dreamt himself to lewd sleepiness.
	The clock ticked on. Time passes.

	VI
	Health and wealth and love he too dreamed of in May
	As he sat on the railway slope and watched the children of the place
	Picking up a primrose here and a daisy there -
	They were picking up life`s truth singly.
	But he dreamt of the Absolute envased bouquet -
	AIl or nothing. And it was nothing. For God is not all
	In one place, complete
	Till Hope comes in and takes it on his shoulder -
	O Christ, that is what you have done for us:
	In a crumb of bread the whole mystery is.
	He read the symbol too sharply and turned
	From the five simple doors of sense
	To the door whose combination lock has puzzled
	Philosopher and priest and common dunce.
	Men build their heavens as they build their circles
	Of friends. God is in the bits and pieces of Everyday -
	A kiss here and a laugh again, and sometimes tears,
	A pearl necklace round the neck of poverty.
	He sat on the railway slope and watched the evening,
	Too beautifully perfect to use,
	And his three wishes were three stones too sharp to sit on,
	Too hard to carve. Three frozen idols of a speechless muse.

	VII
	`Now go to Mass and pray and confess your sins
	And you`ll have all the luck,` his mother said.
	He listened to the lie that is a woman`s screen
	Around a conscience when soft thighs are spread.
	And all the while she was setting up the lie
	She trusted in Nature that never deceives.
	But her son took it as literal truth.
	Religion`s walls expand to the push of nature. Morality yields
	To sense - but not in little tillage fields.
	Life went on like that. One summer morning
	Again through a hay-field on her way to the shop -
	The grass was wet and over-leaned the path -
	And Agnes held her skirts sensationally up,
	And not because the grass was wet either.
	A man was watching her, Patrick Maguire.
	She was in love with passion and its weakness
	And the wet grass could never cool the fire
	That radiated from her unwanted womb in that metaphysical land
	Where flesh was thought more spiritual than music
	Among the stars - out of reach of the peasant`s hand.
	Ah, but the priest was one of the people too -
	A farmers son - and surely he knew
	The needs of a brother and sister.
	Religion could not be a counter-irritant like a blister,
	But the certain standard, measured and known
	By which man might re-make his soul though all walls were down
	And all earth`s pedestalled gods thrown.

	VIII
	Sitting on a wooden gate,
	Sitting on a wooden gate,
	Sitting on a wooden gate
	He didn`t care a damn.
	Said whatever came into his head,
	Said whatever came into his head,
	Said whatever came into his head
	And inconsequently sang.
	While his world withered away,
	He had a cigarette to smoke and a pound to spend
	On drink the next Saturday.
	His cattle were fat
	And his horses all that
	Midsummer grass could make them.
	The young women ran wild
	And dreamed of a child
	Joy dreams though the fathers might forsake them
	But no one would take them;
	No man could ever see
	That their skirts had loosed buttons,
	O the men were as blind as could be.
	And Patrick Maguire
	From his. purgatory fire
	Called the gods of the Christian to prove
	That this twisted skein
	Was the necessary pain
	And not the rope that was strangling true love.
	But sitting on a wooden gate
	Sometime in July
	When he was thirty-four or five
	He gloried in the lie:
	He made it read the way it should,
	He made life read the evil good
	While he cursed the ascetic brotherhood
	Without knowing why.
	Sitting on a wooden gate
	All, all alone
	He sang and laughed
	Like a man quite daft,
	Or like a man on a channel raft
	He fantasied forth his groan.
	Sitting on a wooden gate,
	Sitting on a wooden gate,
	Sitting on a wooden gate
	He rode in day-dream cars.
	He locked his body with his knees
	When the gate swung too much in the breeze.
	But while he caught high ecstasies
	Life slipped between the bars.

	IX
	He gave himself another year,
	Something was bound to happen before then -
	The circle would break down
	And he would carve the new one to his own will.
	A new rhythm is a new life
	And in it marriage is hung and money.
	He would be a new man walking through unbroken meadows
	Of dawn in the year of One.
	The poor peasant talking to himself in a stable door
	An ignorant peasant deep in dung.
	What can the passers-by think otherwise?
	Where is his silver bowl of knowledge hung?
	Why should men be asked to believe in a soul
	That is only the mark of a hoof in guttery gaps?
	A man is what is written on the label.
	And the passing world stares but no one stops
	To look closer. So back to the growing crops
	And the ridges he never loved.
	Nobody will ever know how much tortured poetry the pulled weeds on the ridge wrote
	Before they withered in the July sun,
	Nobody will ever read the wild, sprawling, scrawling mad woman`s signature,
	The hysteria and the boredom of the enclosed nun of his thought.
	Like the afterbirth of a cow stretched on a branch in the wind
	Life dried in the veins of these women and men:
	`The grey and grief and unloved,
	The bones in the backs of their hands,
	And the chapel pressing its low ceiling over them.
	Sometimes they did laugh and see the sunlight,
	A narrow slice of divine instruction.
	Going along the river at the bend of Sunday
	The trout played in the pools encouragement
	To jump in love though death bait the hook.
	And there would be girls sitting on the grass banks of lanes.
	Stretch-legged and lingering staring -
	A man might take one of them if he had the courage.
	But `No` was in every sentence of their story
	Except when the public-house came in and shouted its piece.
	The yellow buttercups and the bluebells among the whin bushes
	On rocks in the middle of ploughing
	Was a bright spoke in the wheel
	Of the peasant`s mill.
	The goldfinches on the railway paling were worth looking at -
	A man might imagine then
	Himself in Brazil and these birds the birds of paradise
	And the Amazon and the romance traced on the school map lived again.
	Talk in evening corners and under trees
	Was like an old book found in a king`s tomb.
	The children gathered round like students and listened
	And some of the saga defied the draught in the open tomb
	And was not blown.

	X
	Their intellectual life consisted in reading
	Reynolds News or the Sunday Dispatch,
	With sometimes an old almanac brought down from the ceiling
	Or a school reader brown with the droppings of thatch.
	The sporting results or the headlines of war
	Was a humbug profound as the highbrow`s Arcana.
	Pat tried to be wise to the abstraction of all that
	But its secret dribbled down his waistcoat like a drink from a strainer.
	He wagered a bob each way on the Derby,
	He got a straight tip from a man in a shop -
	A double from the Guineas it was and thought himself
	A master mathematician when one of them came up
	And he could explain how much he`d have drawn
	On the double if the second leg had followed the first.
	He was betting on form and breeding, he claimed,
	And the man that did that could never be burst.
	After that they went on to the war, and the generals
	On both sides were shown to be stupid as hell.
	If he`d taken that road, they remarked of a Marshal,
	He`d have … O they know their geography well
	This was their university. Maguire was an undergraduate
	Who dreamed from his lowly position of rising
	To a professorship like Larry McKenna or Duffy
	Or the pig-gelder Nallon whose knowledge was amazing.
	`A treble, full multiple odds … That`s flat porter …
	Another one … No, you`re wrong about that thing I was telling you. .
	Did you part with your filly, Jack? I heard that you sold her.…`
	The students were all savants by the time of pub-close.

	XI
	A year passed and another hurried after it
	And Patrick Maguire was still six months behind life -
	His mother six months ahead of it;
	His sister straddle-legged across it: -
	One leg in hell and the other in heaven
	And between the purgatory of middle-aged virginity -
	She prayed for release to heaven or hell.
	His mother`s voice grew thinner like a rust-worn knife
	But it cut venomously as it thinned,
	It cut him up the middle till he became more woman than man,
	And it cut through to his mind before the end.
	Another field whitened in the April air
	And the harrows rattled over the seed.
	He gathered the loose stones off the ridges carefully
	And grumbled to his men to hurry. He looked like a man who could give advice
	To foolish young fellows. He was forty-seven,
	And there was depth in his jaw and his voice was the voice of a great cattle-dealer,
	A man with whom the fair-green gods break even.
	`I think I ploughed that lea the proper depth,
	She ought to give a crop if any land gives …
	Drive slower with the foal-mare, Joe.`
	Joe, a young man of imagined wives,
	Smiles to himself and answered like a slave:
	`You needn`t fear or fret.
	I`m taking her as easy, as easy as …
	Easy there Fanny, easy, pet.`
	They loaded the day-scoured implements on the cart
	As the shadows of poplars crookened the furrows.
	It was the evening, evening. Patrick was forgetting to be lonely
	As he used to be in Aprils long ago.
	It was the menopause, the misery-pause.
	The schoolgirls passed his house laughing every morning
	And sometimes they spoke to him familiarly -
	He had an idea. Schoolgirls of thirteen
	Would see no political intrigue in an old man`s friendship.
	Love
	The heifer waiting to be nosed by the old bull.
	That notion passed too - there was the danger of talk
	And jails are narrower than the five-sod ridge
	And colder than the black hills facing Armagh in February.
	He sinned over the warm ashes again and his crime
	The law`s long arm could not serve with time.
	His face set like an old judge`s pose:
	Respectability and righteousness,
	Stand for no nonsense.
	The priest from the altar called Patrick Maguire`s name
	To hold the collecting-box in the chapel door
	During all the Sundays of May.
	His neighbours envied him his holy rise,
	But he walked down from the church with affected indifference
	And took the measure of heaven angle-wise.
	He still could laugh and sing,
	But not the wild laugh or the abandoned harmony now
	That called the world to new silliness from the top of a wooden gate
	When thirty-five could take the sparrow`s bow.
	Let us be kind, let us be kind and sympathetic:
	Maybe life is not for joking or for finding happiness in -
	This tiny light in Oriental Darkness
	Looking out chance windows of poetry or prayer.
	And the grief and defeat of men like these peasants
	Is God`s way - maybe - and we must not want too much
	To see.
	The twisted thread is stronger than the wind-swept fleece.
	And in the end who shall rest in truth`s high peace?
	Or whose is the world now, even now?
	O let us kneel where the blind ploughman kneels
	And learn to live without despairing
	In a mud-walled space -
	Illiterate unknown and unknowing.
	Let us kneel where he kneels
	And feel what he feels.
	One day he saw a daisy and he thought it
	Reminded him of his childhood -
	He stopped his cart to look at it.
	Was there a fairy hiding behind it?
	He helped a poor woman whose cow
	Had died on her;
	He dragged home a drunken man on a winter`s night
	And one rare moment he heard the young people playing on the railway stile
	And he wished them happiness and whatever they most desired from life.
	He saw the sunlight and begrudged no man
	His share of what the miserly soil and soul
	Gives in a season to a ploughman.
	And he cried for his own loss one late night on the pillow
	And yet thanked the God who had arranged these things.
	Was he then a saint?
	A Matt Talbot of Monaghan?
	His sister Mary Anne spat poison at the children
	Who sometimes came to the door selling raffle tickets
	For holy funds.
	`Get out, you little tramps!` she would scream
	As she shook to the hens an armful of crumbs,
	But Patrick often put his hand deep down
	In his trouser-pocket and fingered out a penny
	Or maybe a tobacco-stained caramel.
	`You`re soft,` said the sister; `with other people`s money
	It`s not a bit funny.`
	The cards are shuffled and the deck
	Laid flat for cutting - Tom Malone
	Cut for trump. I think we`ll make
	This game, the last, a tanner one.
	Hearts. Right. I see you`re breaking
	Your two-year-old. Play quick, Maguire,
	The clock there says it`s half-past ten -
	Kate, throw another sod on that fire.
	One of the card-players laughs and spits
	Into the flame across a shoulder.
	Outside, a noise like a rat
	Among the hen-roosts.
	The cock crows over
	The frosted townland of the night.
	Eleven o`clock and still the game
	Goes on and the players seem to be
	Drunk in an Orient opium den.
	Midnight, one o`clock, two.
	Somebody`s leg has fallen asleep.
	What about home? Maguire, are you
	Using your double-tree this week?
	Why? do you want it? Play the ace.
	There`s it, and that`s the last card for me.
	A wonderful night, we had. Duffy`s place
	Is very convenient. Is that a ghost or a tree?
	And so they go home with dragging feet
	And their voices rumble like laden carts.
	And they are happy as the dead or sleeping …
	I should have led that ace of hearts.

	XII
	The fields were bleached white,
	The wooden tubs full of water
	Were white in the winds
	That blew through Brannagan`s Gap on their way from Siberia;
	The cows on the grassless heights .
	Followed the hay that had wings -
	The February fodder that hung itself on the black branches
	Of the hill-top hedge.
	A man stood beside a potato-pit
	And clapped his arms
	And pranced on the crisp roots
	And shouted to warm himself.
	Then he buck-leaped about the potatoes
	And scooped them into a basket.
	He looked like a bucking suck-calf
	Whose spine was being tickled.
	Sometimes he stared across the bogs
	And sometimes he straightened his back and vaguely whistled
	A tune that weakened his spirit
	And saddened his terrier dog`s.
	A neighbour passed with a spade on his shoulder
	And Patrick Maguire bent like a bridge
	Whistled-good morning under his oxter
	And the man the other side of the hedge
	Champed his spade on the road at his toes
	And talked an old sentimentality
	While the wind blew under his clothes.
	The mother sickened and stayed in bed all day,
	Her head hardly dented the pillow, so light and thin it had worn,
	But she still enquired after the household affairs.
	She held the strings of her children`s Punch and Judy, and when a mouth opened
	It was her truth that the dolls would have spoken
	If they hadn`t been made of wood and tin -
	`Did you open the barn door, Pat, to let the young calves in?`
	The priest called to see her every Saturday
	And she told him her troubles and fears:
	`If Mary Anne was settled I`d die in peace -
	I`m getting on in years.`
	`You were a good woman,` said the priest,
	`And your children will miss you when you`re gone.
	The likes of you this parish never knew,
	I`m sure they`ll not forget the work you`ve done.`
	She reached five bony crooks under the tick -
	`Five pounds for Masses - won`t you say them quick.`
	She died one morning in the beginning of May
	And a shower of sparrow-notes was the litany for her dying.
	The holy water was sprinkled on the bed-clothes
	And her children stood around the bed and cried because it was too late for crying.
	A mother dead! The tired sentiment:
	`Mother, Mother` was a shallow pool
	Where sorrow hardly could wash its feet …
	Mary Anne came away from the deathbed and boiled the calves their gruel.
	`O what was I doing when the procession passed?
	Where was I looking? Young women and men
	And I might have joined them.
	Who bent the coin of my destiny
	That it stuck in the slot?
	I remember a night we walked
	Through the moon of Donaghmoyne,
	Four of us seeking adventure,
	It was midsummer forty years ago.
	Now I know
	The moment that gave the turn to my life.
	O Christ! I am locked in a stable with pigs and cows for ever.

	XIII
	The world looks on
	And talks of the peasant:
	The peasant has no worries;
	In his little lyrical fields He ploughs and sows;
	He eats fresh food,
	He loves fresh women, He is his own master
	As it was in the Beginning
	The simpleness of peasant life.
	The birds that sing for him are eternal choirs ,
	Everywhere he walks there are flowers.
	His heart is pure, His mind is clear,
	He can talk to God as Moses and Isaiah talked
	The peasant who is only one remove from the beasts he drives. `
	"The travellers stop their cars to gape over the green bank into his fields: -
	There is the source from which all cultures rise,
	And all religions,
	There is the pool in which the poet dips
	And the musician.
	Without the peasant base civilisation must die,
	Unless the clay is in the mouth the singer`s singing is useless.
	The travellers touch the roots of the grass and feel renewed
	When they grasp the steering wheels again.
	The peasant is the unspoiled child of Prophecy,
	The peasant is all virtues - let us salute him without irony
	The peasant ploughman who is half a vegetable -
	Who can react to sun and rain and sometimes even
	Regret that the Maker of Light had not touched him more intensely.
	Brought him up from the sub-soil to an existence
	Of conscious joy. He was not born blind.
	He is not always blind: sometimes the cataract yields
	To sudden stone-falling or the desire to breed.
	The girls pass along the roads
	And he can remember what man is,
	But there is nothing he can do.
	Is there nothing he can do?
	Is there no escape?
	No escape, no escape.
	The cows and horses breed,
	And the potato-seed
	Gives a bud and a root and rots
	In the good mother`s way with her sons;
	The fledged bird is thrown
	From the nest - on its own.
	But the peasant in his little acres is tied
	To a mother`s womb by the wind-toughened navel-cord
	Like a goat tethered to the stump of a tree -
	He circles around and around wondering why it should be.
	No crash, No drama.
	That was how his life happened.
	No mad hooves galloping in the sky,
	But the weak, washy way of true tragedy -
	A sick horse nosing around the meadow for a clean place to die.

	XIV
	We may come out in the October reality, Imagination,
	The sleety wind no longer slants to the black hill where Maguire
	And his men are now collecting the scattered harness and baskets.
	The dog sitting on a wisp of dry stalks
	Watches them through the shadows.
	`Back in, back in.` One talks to the horse as to a brother.
	Maguire himself is patting a potato-pit against the weather -
	An old man fondling a new-piled grave:
	`Joe, I hope you didn`t forget to hide the spade .
	For there`s rogues in the townland.
	Hide it flat in a furrow.
	I think we ought to be finished by to-morrow.
	Their voices through the darkness sound like voices from a cave,
	A dull thudding far away, futile, feeble, far away,
	First cousins to the ghosts of the townland.
	A light stands in a window. Mary Anne
	Has the table set and the tea-pot waiting in the ashes.
	She goes to the door and listens and then she calls
	From the top of the haggard-wall :
	`What`s keeping you
	And the cows to be milked and all the other work there`s to do?`
	`All right, all right
	We`ll not stay here all night `
	Applause, applause,
	The curtain falls.
	Applause, applause
	From the homing carts and the trees
	And the bawling cows at the gates.
	From the screeching water-hens
	And the mill-race heavy with the Lammas floods curving over the weir
	A train at the station blowing off steam
	And the hysterical laughter of the defeated everywhere.
	Night, and the futile cards are shuffled again.
	Maguire spreads his legs over the impotent cinders that wake no manhood now
	And he hardly looks to see which card is trump.
	His sister tightens her legs and her lips and frizzles up
	Like the wick of an oil-less lamp.
	The curtain falls -
	Applause, applause.
	Maguire is not afraid of death, the Church will light him a candle
	To see his way through the vaults and he`ll understand the
	Quality of the clay that dribbles over his coffin.
	He`ll know the names of the roots that climb down to tickle his feet.
	And he will feel no different than when he walked through Donaghmoyne.
	If he stretches out a hand - a wet clod,
	If he opens his nostrils - a dungy smell;
	If he opens his eyes once in a million years -
	Through a crack in the crust of the earth he may see a face nodding in
	Or a woman`s legs.
	Shut them again for that sight is sin.
	He will hardly remember that life happened to him -
	Something was brighter a moment. Somebody sang in the distance
	A procession passed down a mesmerized street.
	He remembers names like Easter and Christmas
	By colour his fields were.
	Maybe he will be born again, a bird of an angel`s conceit
	To sing the gospel of life
	To a music as flighty tangent
	As a tune on an oboe.
	And the serious look of his fields will have changed to the leer of a hobo.
	Swaggering celestially home to his three wishes granted.
	Will that be? will that be?
	Or is the earth right that laughs haw-haw
	And does not believe
	In an unearthly law.
	The earth that says:
	Patrick Maguire, the old peasant, can neither be damned nor glorified:
	The graveyard in which he will lie will be just a deep-drilled potato-field
	Where the seed gets no chance to come through
	To the fun of the sun.
	The tongue in his mouth is the root of a yew.
	Silence, silence. The story is done.
	He stands in the doorway of his house
	A ragged sculpture of the wind,
	October creaks the rotted mattress,
	The bedposts fall. No hope. No lust.
	The hungry fiend
	Screams the apocalypse of clay
	In every corner of this land.
Source
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