Francis Duggan Poems

A two hundred and fifty kilometres firefront is burning through Victoria East
Blackening the environment and dispossessing human, bird and beast
Clogging the sky with gray fog for hundreds of kilometres around
And only blackened desolation where it has been through to be found.
...

Across the place of stones and thistles known as the hungry hill
The harsh call of the kookaburra echoes loud and shrill
And down in the wooded gully the calls of the weerloo
In this the home of wallaby and the wild grey kangaroo,
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Crows are not good at singing caw caw is their only song
But those who say quite ugly birds have surely got it wrong
Their feathers dark and glossy have got a lustrous sheen
And they are very pretty birds when in the sunlight seen,
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The familiar sounds made by the male snipe above the bog at night
With wings and tail he makes a goat like noise whilst in his courtship flight
In Spring and early Summer him i often did hear
But that was many years ago and many miles from here.
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Their soft piping notes have a beautiful ring
And above the beach as they fly they do sing
With orange coloured bills and as dark as a crow
Their beauty goes with them to where-ever they go.
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'Tis true to the dead that respect we should show
But they still honour men who died ninety years ago
For a dubious cause in Lands far away
But the war that was supposed to end all wars is re-lived today.
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Those enamoured by death who of immortality dream
Suffer of delusion or so it does seem
For in the scale of time everything seems to fade
And the dead cannot witness their memorial parade.
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Death comes to the living at the end of their life
It happens to the husband and it happens to the wife
It happens to the girl and it happens to the boy
Some granted a short spell for to live and enjoy,
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We never are too old for to stop learning and from life we learn a lesson every day
And it does not mean that you have to stop learning even though you have grown old and tired and gray
And those who think they know it all know little they go through life as blinkered one might say
The more we know the less we know we do know that's life and life has always been this way,
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I read it on the internet how Noel Hartnett had died
At fairs and marts in Munster he was known far and wide
A warm hearted fellow and in him nothing cold
A million calves in his life he must have bought and sold.
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