#Irish Poets

[fjphoenix-poetry]

[unofficialchronicle]

Excerpt from the poem "For the Dying," by John O'Donohue

May there be some beautiful surprise

Waiting for you inside death

Something you never knew or felt,

Which with one simple touch

Absolves you of all loneliness and loss,

As you quicken within the embrace

For which your soul was eternally made.

May your heart be speechless

At the sight of the truth

Of all your belief had hoped,

Your heart breathless

In the light and lightness

Where each and every thing

Is at last its true self

Within that serene belonging

That dwells beside us

On the other side

Of what we see.

a link to the whole poem: https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/for-the-dying/

John O'Donohue was an Irish poet, author, priest, and Hegelian philosopher. He was a native Irish speaker, and as an author is best known for popularising Celtic spirituality. He was born in West Region, Ireland, in 1956. He died in 2008, and is buried in Creggagh Cemetery, near Ballyvaughan (in Ireland).

[alchemisland]

notonejot

When my poems drop Crowd looks like Dynasty Warriors So many assets, getting texture pop-ins Console going slow, like it walked behind a coffin Coughing from all day bonging, still throttle any boffin Man better know his Aristotle, making words Boggle Instinct, your efforts a troglodyte’s inkling Lady of Shalott how she floats on the loch Like rotten jetsam flotsam, nearby Crowley…

[chronically-chaotic-cryptid]

There needs to be more Patrick Kavanagh posting on this site. A non-exhaustive list of poems you people would go wild over inclues:

The Hospital

Inniskeen Road: July Evening

Memory of my Father

Epic

To Hell With Commonsense

Address to a Wooden Gate

Dear Folks

Let me tell you if he had been a young english woman yous would have been posting quotes from day one

[ladybird-nerd]

Yeats has had his day. Get this man on the leaving cert course ☘️

[woahpip]

from Vocal Chords by Maeve O'Sullivan

[hallohartje]

Amber

It never mattered that there was once a vast grieving:

trees on their hillsides, in their groves, weeping— a plastic gold dropping

through seasons and centuries to the ground— until now.

On this fine September afternoon from which you are absent I am holding, as if my hand could store it, an ornament of amber

you once gave me.

Reason says this: The dead cannot see the living. The living will never see the dead again.

The clear air we need to find each other in is gone forever, yet

this resin once collected seeds, leaves and even small feathers as it fell and fell

which now in a sunny atmosphere seem as alive as they ever were

as though the past could be present and memory itself a Baltic honey—

a chafing at the edges of the seen, a showing off of just how much can be kept safe

inside a flawed translucence.

-- Eavan Boland

[importantwomensbirthdays]

Ella Young

Writer and scholar Ella Young was born in 1867 in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. Young published her first book of poetry in 1906, with a work of Irish folklore following three years later. In 1910, she published Celtic Wonder Tales, another collection of Celtic myths, which was later translated into French and received new editions in 1923, 1995, and 2001. Young was a member of Sinn Féin and a participant in the 1916 Uprising. She believed in the revival of Irish culture through the promotion of Celtic mythology. Young came to the US to teach at UC Berkeley, becoming a respected educator. Two of her books, The Wonder Smith and His Son and The Tangle-Coated Horse and Other Tales were Newbery Honor books.

Ella Young died in 1956 at the age of 88.

[strawberryjayne]

Personal Helicon by Seamus Heaney

For Michael Longley

As a child, they could not keep me from wells

And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.

I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells

Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.

I savoured the rich crash when a bucket

Plummeted down at the end of a rope.

So deep you saw no reflection in it.

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch

Fructified like any aquarium.

When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch

A white face hovered over the bottom.

Others had echoes, gave back your own call

With a clean new music in it. And one

Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall

Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,

To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring

Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme

To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

[covington-shenanigans]

the second coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

text at poetryfoundation.org

some analysis

some more analysis

[loudlylovingreview]

Aidan Rooney: Bel-Air by Louis-Philippe Dalembert

after the French of Louis-Philippe Dalembert, translated by Aidan Rooneyi’d have loved to be back then againon that street with a view of the seathe masses flock to to channel hope from the harrowing daily paththose alleys seven times knifed then again then alwaysto be part of the tight knit gathered round over a sewer coverto watch as they germinate the stars no one of us had sown i’d have loved…

[fjphoenix-poetry]

No words

Your disappointment in me -

plain to see

and worst of all

completely deserved.

For you so eloquently

told me of your love -

it's only my name stitched onto your heart

by the thread

of angels -

you said.

Then, your eyes looked into mine.

Searching.

And the more you peered

the more saddened you became

for no words

did I speak.

'Goodbye'

you mouthed

over the pandemonium

of the ear splitting

quietness.

If only

I had been able to explain -

there just aren't words

heavenly enough

to describe

my

love

for

you.

[livingfictionsystem]

On April 26th, 1895, Oscar Wilde, famed flamboyant wit and dramatist, was charged by the crown with 25 counts of "gross indecency." Otherwise known as, "homosexual acts in Victorian times."

He was known for his wit on the stand, reportedly making members of the jury laugh so often that it infuriated the judge. Such as this hilarious banter:

Oscar Wilde: "Yes, I had a bottle of champagne on ice, against my doctor's orders."

Edward Carson, persuction: "Never mind your doctor's orders!"

Oscar Wilde: "I never do. :>"

He was sentenced to two years hard labour. The sentence cost him his family, his career, his home, and, heavily traumatized, he lived his remaining three years drinking and taking in the sights in either France or Italy. He largely never wrote creatively again and he died at the age of 46.

Many credit his decision to stand in trial rather than flee to accelerating the acceptance of queer culture, and some have referred to him as the LGBT+ "Jesus." (He's also made the comparison. His self-esteem was wrecked in prison but his ego decidedly was Not.) His original version of the Picture of Dorian Gray contained a homoromantic confession between two characters. He was a feminist, a socialist, and an Irish Liberationist.

His last words were reportedly: "Either this wallpaper goes, or I do."

[ladybird-nerd]

☘️

Fontaines D.C. - I Love You (Live at Red Rocks)

[bardoftara]

Sinéad

With tearful eyes I listenedAs you sang The Foggy DewAnd that song that really says it allNothing compares to you Your magic voice enchants usAnd brings us all great joyLike when you were on the late lateAnd you sang O Danny Boy Continue reading Untitled

[biboomerangboi]

Irish-uwufication is so fucking weird anyway but like people act like Hozier - who writes primarily blues songs about politics, books and music he finds interesting, and having sex with hot women he picks up in bars - is just a nature man is so weird. Like you have Americans saying he is a bog man, he only writes acoustic songs about chaste love and nature. He lives in the woods and doesn’t interact with society at all. He is made of trees and fairies because that’s what Ireland is.