A little bit of Culture...  Poetry from soc.culture.irish

Poetry of Ireland  (Irish poets writing in English)

Posted by Tony Dermody
on:    6 January 2001

The following four poems can be found (among others) at a web-site entitled "FAMINE POETRY". It is at: http://www.nde.state.ne.us/SS/irish/unit_7.html, or can be accessed from: http://www.nde.state.ne.us/SS/irish_famine.html.

The site has the following notice: "Poetry used by permission of the Irish Academic Press, Dublin. Excerpted from The Hungry Voice, Edited by Chris Morash, 1989".

The Famine Year (The Stricken Land)
Jane Francesca Wilde

(Oscar Wilde’s mother, also known as Speranza)

The Hungry Voice
edited by Chris Morash
Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1989

 

Weary men, what reap ye? - Golden corn for the stranger.
What sow ye? - Human corpses that wait for the avenger.
Fainting forms, hunger-stricken, what see you in the offing?
Stately ships to bear our food away, amid the stranger's scoffing.
There's a proud array of soldiers - what do they round your door?
They guard our masters' granaries from the thin hands of the poor.
Pale mothers, wherefore weeping - Would to God that we were dead;
Our children swoon before us, and we cannot give them bread.

We are wretches, famished, scorned, human tools to build your pride,
But God will yet take vengeance for the souls for whom Christ died.
Now is your hour of pleasure - bask ye in the world's caress;
But our whitening bones against ye will rise as witnesses,
From the cabins and the ditches, in their charred, uncoffin'd masses,
For the Angel of the Trumpet will know them as he passes.
A ghastly, spectral army, before the great God we'll stand,
And arraign ye as our murderers, the spoilers of our land.

                [The Itinerant Singing Girl]
                [Give Me Three Grains Of Corn, Mother]
                [Dark Rosaleen]


--- The End ---

Questions? Comments? -K. E. Dennis

Poetry of Ireland   (Irish poets writing in English)

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