Memories Of The Past With Me Remain Poem by Francis Duggan

The mentors I knew in my boyhood with the dearly departed lay
But they are alive in my memory and mental pictures of them till death with me will stay
They left me their great gift of insight the wisdom to them handed down
By the wise elders of their younger years who lived in and near the Hometown,
Some of the boys and girls I grew up with are the grandparents of today
And like me the years now telling on them the years leave us all looking gray
And the hands of time ever keep turning the clocks on our lives ticking on
Of the past we now only have memories for the past from us is forever gone,
I was a school-boy of the fifties in time now that seems long ago
In the clear stream that flowed by my old home the dipper's voice I got to know
The robin he sang on the cypress the dunnock chirped on the hedgerow
And I had become quite familiar to the hoarse loud caw of the gray crow,
The stream bank high flows to the river swelled by recent heavy showers of rain
And despite the comings and goings of the Seasons memories of the past with me remain.