Francis Duggan Poems

For the potato picker life is tough
He knows what it's like to live rough
The work is hard, the pay is small
One could hardly call it life at all.
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Australia the Land of the Dreamtime the home of the wombat and roo
The home of Koala and emu and the black and the white cockatoo
Where kookaburra welcomes the dawning and magpie often heard in the night
And the mopoke call of the brown boobook can be heard in the calm moonlight.
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In his Lifetime Patrick Kavanagh was a literary man of note
And in the mid twentieth century some critics claimed him to be Ireland's finest poet
In the forties to the sixties he was lauded as a poetic great
But nowadays he is not the poet the masses celebrate.
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Some lack in compassion as well as in empathy
And for the suffering of those they see as different can't feel sympathy
And sad to say nowadays their type are not rare
The small minded sort of the big World out there.
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For ever lasting glory hardship price he paid
The founder of the Land League the patriot from Straide
He stood against the Landlords for Ireland's rural poor
And spent long years behind bars in the prison of Dartmoor.
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I knew him in my school days he is a year older than I
And even then he was known as a very clever boy
And to those who know him years later on it came as no surprise
When the famous poet from Cullen won the Whitbread Poetry Prize.
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He always does look very sad and alone
And a laugh out of him like drawing blood from a stone
That he does not have friends no need to wonder why
That serious people do not draw people to them to him does apply
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He would kill and eat their baby birds the songbirds seem to know
So they do their best their very best to frighten off the crow
Their babies from such an awful fate they risk their lives to save
They even mob the bigger bird they are so very brave
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He says he is good for the Country he goes to his job every day
And he works damn hard for a living and he's never drawn easy pay
And he is down on all dole bludgers he sees them as without a soul
Though he never tells anybody that he has two sons on the dole.
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Those happy Morris dancers make for a happy sight
They wear bright scarlet ribbons and their shirts and trousers white,
They clash their sticks whilst dancing and you hear the timbers ring
Though 'twould seem that Morris dancing is not a female thing.
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