MY grief! that they have laid you in the town
Within the moidher of its thousand wheels
And busy feet that travel up and down.
They had a right to choose a better bed
Far off among the hills where silence steals
In on the soul with comfort-bringing tread.
The curlew would have keened for you all day,
The wind across the heather cried Ochone
For sorrow of his brother gone away.
In Glenmalure, far off from town-bred men,
Why would they not have left your sleep alone
At peace there in the shadow of the glen?
To tend your grave you should have had the sun,
The fraughan and the moss, the heather brown
And gorse turned gold for joy of Spring begun
You should have had your brothers, wind and rain,
And in the dark the stars all looking down
To ask, “When will he take the road again?”
The herdsmen of the lone back hills, that drive
The mountain ewes to some far distant fair,
Would stand and say, “We knew him well alive,
That God may rest his soul!” then they would pass
Into the silence brooding everywhere,
And leave you to your sleep below the grass.
But now among these alien city graves,
What way are you without the rough wind’s breath
You free-born son of mountains and wild waves?
Ah! God knows better-here you’ve no abode,
So long ago you had the laugh at death,
And rose and took the windswept mountain road.
—————
The End
And that’s the End of the Poem
© Poetry Monster, 2021.
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Some external links: The Bat’s Poetry Cave. — Fledermaus’s poetry site. Talking Writing Monster. — the irreverent and irrelevant chatter on subjects both serious and not quite. A free for all board. You can scribble anything on it without registration (but it doesn’t let spammers in). You can even post your poems. Qwant.com. — a search engine from France. It’s an alternative because there are a few alternatives, like Bing, Duckduckgo, and Ecosia. And there is Yandex, the ultimate language-oriented search engine for the Russophone world. Commercial Links: Russian Commerce – the foreign trade assistance agency Other links: Poems and poetry in Russian (if you are reading this in English, as you obviously are, then you’d have to switch the language, the language switch is on the menu. More on languages)
