A Claraghatlea Fellow Is All I Can Be Poem by Francis Duggan

Wherever i go to my past goes with me
A Claraghatlea fellow is all i can be
I am from the place of the silver tongued rill
That babbles to the river down the field by the hill

By denying my past to myself i would lie
A Claraghatlea fellow i will be till i die
It is there i was born and grew into a man
Though far south of there i may live out my life span

From Claraghatlea i'm one who lives far away
And there i'd be a stranger to many today
Though the old fields i loved perhaps would look the same
I recall many of them by their given name

A migrant from Claraghatlea well past his prime
As gray as a badger from the passing of time
Yet in my flights of fancy i can hear and see
A pink breasted male bullfinch singing on a birch tree

When the nesting birds sing at the twilight of day
And the hawthorns are cloaked in their white blooms of the May
And the freshening winds from the hills gather the clouds of rain
In fancy i walk with my old dog Pudsy in the fields again.