Crimson our halberds from the gore of the Saxons!
The firebrand soon secured and our sword arms aching.
Affliction our foes’ part and Fiach McHugh O’Byrne
honoured at the pig feast by rivers of mead;
shrill from the dark high glen the bleating of sheep
while in and out of the mist floats Lugnaquilla.
The Castle styles Michael Dwyer a common killer
and, be it hereby known, will spare no expense
in his apprehension. Caught, this felon will ship
to New South Wales there to lament, ochone,
at his leisure his exile from old Wicklow amid
Fenians who barely ’scaped hanging like Billy Byrne.
An old man I passed by the monument to the O’Byrne
deep in the glen, his face a sunburnt colour,
had about him so melancholy a mood
I felt the spirit of that mountainous expanse
convert us, strangers, into almost kin
in that quiet corner where a man could sleep.
Early one morning a fair maid I met on the slope
of Ballinacor, her dark eyes heavy with brine
from weeping for her dear one unjustly taken,
the blackbird of sweet Avondale who would call her
his leannán, his darling from the tree-top in accents
so soft that for that want of them she was unmade.
Farmyard cottages ready to view, all mod
cons, no chain. Give the recession the slip
where money doesn’t swear, it talks sense.
Take in the pine woods’ late autumnal auburn
round picture-postcard-pretty Lugnaquilla
between the waterfall and perennial bracken.
Driving down into Glenmalure, not speaking,
the road flooded, the wheels spinning in mud:
O Fiach McHugh! Waiting for the shower to clear,
getting out, walking, feeling the damp seep
through my boots down the accursed boreen
where I revved and tried in vain to turn on a sixpence.
And crueller than all weather loom again
those peaks on the line of the sky that still drive mad
the woebegone sheep astray where the gorse fires burn.