Francis Duggan Poems

On a tall beech tree the black and gray hooded crow
Caws in the gloaming where the Blackwater flow
Through the fields of Duhallow babbling on down
Through that old quiet countryside towards Mallow Town.
...

She bit me in the face last night as of my blood she took her fill
And she escaped me with her life since her I tried to kill
She needed a droplet of my blood for to help her for her eggs in water to lay
The elusive female mosquito will die in a natural way.
...

The shrike thrush in his cloak of brown and gray
Whistles and sings in Mt Eccles today
And the white sulphur crested cockatoos utter their grating cries
On the trees on the cliffs above old Lake Surprise
...

The rhymes I pen do seem a little rough
As literary critics might say not good enough
To be seen as poetry or worthy of note
But then I never said I was a poet
...

I never said to you I was a poet
Or even one of minor literary note
And the stuff I pen I could not hope to sell
The literary purists call it doggerel
...

Though glowing things of you others never may say
If you never harm others and live in the honest way
You are a good person though a stranger to renown
And you don't need to hang your head when walking in the town
...

It has been twenty years at least since I walked the old bohreen
Yet little of the bigger World I can claim to have seen
From the old fields of Claraghatlea I now live far away
But life goes on as usual in the old Townland today,
...

In my flights of fancy the memories come back
To me of when Connie Kelly the dog man ran the Millstreet dog track
And Morty Cronin the hare driver drove the lure around
May they rest in peace now in dead people's ground.
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The reaper who claimed him will one day claim us all
As a young enough man to the scythe of the feared one he did fall
The high fields around Gneeves hill forever look green
Though Peter Kelleher there never more will be seen
...

The sweet scent of hay in the meads of July
And the skylark seemed like a small speck in the sky
He carolled so sweetly as upwards he did soar
Above the old high fields of green Claramore
...