Memories Of The Allow Poem by Francis Duggan

Through fertile fields old Allow meanders down
Through groves and by hedgerows and on through Kanturk Town
Through old Duhallow every night and day
It's waters journey on their sea going way.

Long centuries before the first man came
Before this old land ever had a name
When planet earth was in her infancy
The Allow journeyed down land towards the sea.

I first saw Allow when i was young boy
Some forty years ago how time did fly
On willow tree i heard a chaffinch sing
By that old river in Kanturk in Spring.

I watched a fisherman casting for trout
I saw him haul a near two pounder out
An Allow Brown gleaming like brown stained glass
He flipped about on the ankle high grass

I said the biggest that i ever see
But he smiled what's big to you not so to me
Last week i caught far bigger trout than he
And this one won't live in my memory

Perhaps his son and grandson fish today
From Allow banks all those long miles away
Where little chaffinch on the willow tree
Repeat the same ancestral melody.