Howya Wordy
Yer always given out about that Mrs Byrne wan. Well, take it from Ted, she's right on the whiskey score - uisce beatha literally means "water of life" and is indeed the Irish word fer whisky. Fuisce is another one.
As far as I know, it's the Scottish Gaelic word as well cos it's from the Irish they got their Gaelic. Of course, they spell their whiskey with an "e" - mustn't be from the "wherefor" branch of the Shakespeare family so - who, bye-the-way wrote in a cross between middle and modern English, so I don't think we're in a position ta be judgen his spellen. Anyways, it wasn't himself what got half his plays published. And there were no dictionaries or spell checks in them days, ya know.
Not that I'd be sticken up fer Shakey or anthin - I find him a bit long winded meself. Boren even. I mean those terrable sonnets - what are they about? 16th/17th century sedatives or what? And moreover (morover?)I never seen his name on the Nobel Prize list.
Speaken of which, might I recommend the 1995 winner - Seamus Heaney. He wrote loads of grate pomes - see below.
Yeats, Shaw, Beckett - take yer pick. "Waiten Fer Godot" is gas crack altagether, though probably better seen performed rather than red. Yeats was big inta the "Wee Fellas" or them from the Other World. It's from them I get me powers, ya know. How else do ya think a teddy bear could be so wordy and literal?
I can also recommend Jean Paul Sartre and me very favourite Albear Camoo (no relation, ya understand).
Digging
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade. Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.
Follower
My father worked with a horse-plough,
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
Between the shafts and the furrow.
The horses strained at his clicking tongue.
An expert. He would set the wing
And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.
The sod rolled over without breaking.
At the headrig, with a single pluck
Of reins, the sweating team turned round
And back into the land. His eye
Narrowed and angled at the ground,
Mapping the furrow exactly.
I stumbled in his hobnailed wake,
Fell sometimes on the polished sod;
Sometimes he rode me on his back
Dipping and rising to his plod.
I wanted to grow up and plough,
To close one eye, stiffen my arm.
All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow round the farm.
I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away.
Mid-Term Break
I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home.
In the porch I met my father crying--
He had always taken funerals in his stride--
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.
The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand
And tell me they were `sorry for my trouble'.
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand
In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.
Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,
Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.
A four-foot box, a foot for every year.
WELL, SAY TOO FER NOW
BE SEEIN YA
GALLANTTED
