Francis Duggan Poems

Life for me is a struggle and perhaps i am never more
To see the rocky outcrop of my far Homeland shore
Financially embarrassed and a stranger to renown
And perhaps i would even feel a stranger now in Millstreet my Hometown.
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The grey shrike thrush is whistling a bird i know so well
He sings around his borders as if he wish to tell
Or warn male birds of his kind this is my territory
This patch of ground not your patch is for my wife and me,
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Don't talk of hell to Bill the fluter he knows of Earthly Hell
And he doubts the life hereafter since none of it have come back to tell
He says the dead he knew are silent without a word to say
About the promised life hereafter all is silent where they lay.
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I hear the bellbirds in the wood on the hill
And magpie he opened his silvery bill
And he fluted his wild and his beautiful air
As a Nature songster few with him to compare.
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Back there in old Duhallow the Summer nears her close
And the browness of Nature's decay on the petals of the rose
And the big bird song of the tiny brown wren echoes in the hedgerow
In the quietness of the morning where the old Blackwater flow
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In central Victoria they badly need rain
The water reservoirs almost empty in Bendigo and Castlemaine
Little rainfall in August and less in July
And in Daylesford and Maryborough many water dams dry,
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A penniless fellow yet he laugh and he sing
But wealth some will tell you is a relative thing
He laughs at the World one not fettered by stress
And what happens tomorrow he could not care less
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As near to an Earthly Utopia as one could wish to see
Those rugged old mountains pre-date history
To the very first Aussies strong links it can trace
Dunkeld in the Grampians is a beautiful place.
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You better try to sow seeds of good karma
For with karma we must reap what we sow
And karma is real and has been around forever
And of it's consequences many have come to know.
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I have mental pictures of the stress in his handsome young face
But now he's at rest in a far quieter place
He was a good person as i can recall
Though his mental condition led to his downfall,
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