Francis Duggan Poems

Have you ever felt confused in your thinking
And thought your views on life may be all wrong
That the group of friends which you had known for some years
Is not the group to which you should belong.
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Happy people sow their seeds of happiness or so 'twould seem that way
The smiling face that greets you helps to brighten up your day
Their tiny seed of happiness to great happiness does grow
They are the type of people that all others wish to know
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A good father to his sons Tod and Conor and a good husband to his wife Maureen
'Tis sad to think that in the Town of Millstreet that in the flesh he'll never more be seen
Tom Falvey always was the quiet achiever never did promote himself in any way
Well liked and down to earth and rather gentle and only good of others he did say
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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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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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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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The gum tree is Australian as Aussie as can be
And there's no more Australian than the eucalyptus tree
They have been in Australia perhaps since life began
Thousands and thousands of years before coming of man.
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The dingo does not have many friends and farmer for him gunning
But dingo is a clever dog and he live by his cunning
The farmer on look out for him an eye out for him keeping
But dingo come and steal the lamb at night when farmer's sleeping.
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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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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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