Poems

POEMS BY PADFUIC COLUM -- C O N T E N T S - Dedication To M. C. M. C. Reminiscence Queen Gormlai Gilderoy The Miracle of the Corn Swifts Pastoral The Bird of Jesus . The Burial of Saint Brendan The Ballad of Downal Baun Polonius and the Ballad Singers Old Men Complaining Girls Spinning Blades Scanderbeg Minoan Indian Hawaiian The Plougher The Furrow and the Hearth A Drover v A Connachtman A Man Bereaved An Old Woman of the Roads Interior What the Shuiler said as she lay by the Fire in the Farmers House Spinning Songs The Knitters The Terrible Robber Men Garadh A Rann of Exile Old Soldier The Tin-whistle Player A Mountaineer Sojourning and Wandering Shall I go Bound and you go Free She moved through the Fair Across the Door A Cradle Song The Sisters Lullaby The Beggars Child No Child An Drinaun Donn The Poor Girls Meditation Dermott Donn Macmorna A Poor Scholar of the Forties A Saint The Toy-maker A Ballad Maker The Poet page 88 90 92 93 Arab Songs I shall not die for thee An Idyll Legend Men on Islands Branding the Foals Imitation of a Welsh Poem To a Poet First East to West Atlantic Flyers The Wayfarer In the Carolina Woods Hawaii CREATURES David Ap Gwillam at the Mass of the Birds Jackdaw Crows 0 tters Asses Pigeons Swallow Crane The Little Fox Wild Ass Monkeys Bison Snake Aquarium Fish Night-Fliers Bat Bird of Paradise Humming-bird The Resplendent Quetzal-bird Vultures Hornets Plovers Condors Dublin Roads Laburnurns Lilac Blossoms Fuchsia Hedges in Connacht At Cashel The Old College of the Irish, Paris Song of Starlings Verses for Alfeo Faggis Stations of the Cross Breffne Caoine On Two Sisters whose Deaths were together In Memory of John Butler Yeats The Rune-Master Odysseus InMemory of Arthur Griffith Roger Casement Before the Fair Ave Atque Vale The Landing page 182 183 84 185 I 86 87 I 88 REMINISCENCE, DRAMATIC LEGENDS, DRAMATIC IDYLLS D E D I C A T I O N T O M . C . M . C . THE well-They come to it and take Their cupful or their palmhl out of it. The well-Stones are around it, and an elder bush Is there a high rowan tree and so The well is marked. Who knows Whence come the waters Through what passages Beneath From what high tors Where forests are Forests dripping rain Branches pouring to the ground trunks, barks, roots, Letting the streamlets down through the dark earth The water flows, and in that secret flood Thats called a spring, that finds this little hollow. Who knows Whence come the waters that fill cup and palm Sweetheart and comrade, I give you The waters marches and the forests bound, The valley-filling cloud, the trees that set The rains beneath their roots, out of this well. R E M I N I S C E N C E The Swallows sang ALIEN to us are Your fields, and your cotes, and your glebes Secret our nests are Although they be built in your eaves Un-eaten by us are The grains that grow in your fields. The Weathercock on the barn answered Not alien to ye are The powers of un-earthbound beings Their curse ye would bring On our cotes, and our glebes, and our fields, If aught should befall The brood that is bred in the eaves. The Swallows answered If aught should befall Our brood thats not travelled the seas, Your temples would fall, And blood ye would milk from your beeves Against them the curse we would bring Of un-earthbound beings I1 I saw the wind to-day I saw it in the pane Of glass upon the wall A moving thing- twas like No bird with widening wing, Nomouse that runs along The meal bag under the beam. I think it like a horse, All black, with frightening mane, That springs out of the earth, And tramples on his way...