Francis Duggan Poems

You will not find much signs of life where crops or grass can't grow
Where rain refuse to fall death comes painful and slow
The survivors become climate refugees
In camps where millions live in hopes for visas to Lands overseas
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Like most living life forms we harbour disease
And we play host to mites and we play host to fleas
And our germs search for hosts in the freshening breeze
That we give to the air when we cough or we sneeze
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He was Cork G A A County Secretary when I was a young man
And I am getting on in years at the twilight of my life span
To end the Cork hurlers strike of 2009 he has not gone out of his way
Though in the strike some seem to think that he has some part to play
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When mountains wear their Winter hats of snow
And cold winds down from the cold Northlands blow
And fields from heavy frost are looking gray
Pied wagtail in the farmyard spends his day.
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She was quite young not even in her twenties
And i was two years younger seventeen
And i loved her but the thought of love it scared me
For to the ways of love i was still green.
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Uncommon birds don't see them every day
And so confiding in their own quiet way
Perhaps Australia's tiniest little birds
And beautiful for them the perfect word.
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I can hear the boobook calling in those woods not far away
He is calling in the gum wood bird that hide from lamp of day
Mopoke mopoke re-echo in the silence of the night
And the boobook is a calling when the woods are dark and quiet.
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Don't talk to me of your life's uphill battle
For life's struggles i ought to know about
'Twas want and need that forced me from the Northlands
And I'm no better off here in the South.
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The grey shrike thrush has sung his final song
He lay on forest floor neath fallen leaves
And mother nature who gives life and then take
For her dead children never seems to grieve.
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So many years since nineteen thirty three
When I came here from Northern Italy
The language of Australia I could not speak
And many people thought I was a Greek.
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