The Yearn For Home Poem by Francis Duggan

My memory takes me back long years in time
To boyhood years long, long before my prime
When I was twelve years going on thirteen
But since so many leaves gone with the stream.

When I was young and happy and care-free
Before the wanderlust got hold of me
The wanderlust that beckoned me away
The far off hills are green or so they say.

My mum and dad their bones rest six foot down
In cemetery just east of Millstreet Town
And some of my brothers and sisters not on their native earth
Like me they live far from their Land of birth

I'm a stranger here and mine's a foreign face
But strangely I do not feel out of place
Where Sherbrooke gums reach upwards towards the sky
And white backed magpie flutes his notes of joy.

I'd love to go back home just for the Spring
To hear again the wildborn chaffinch sing
And hear the redbreast pipe his melody
His robin song on flowering hawthorn tree.

To hear again the joyful dipper trill
On rock that jut out of the mountain rill
And barn swallows back from places far away
Fly o'er the flower decked meadows all the day.

The moorhen with her chicks swim to and fro
In river pool where Finnow water flow
A brief sun shower the sun shines through the gray
And butterflies flit around the flowers of May.

I'm a stranger here and mine's a foreign face
Though I don't feel a stranger in the place
But like the swallow I'd like to take wing
And fly back to my Homeland for the Spring.