A chapbook

By

Tom O’Brien

Ballyhussa boreen was potholed in winter and overgrown in summer, but it was home - and it possessed my young soul and my growing body.. I grew up there - and bits of me stayed there. In the hedges and furze bushes, in the groves and ploughed fields, in the streams and ponds. This chapbook is a tribute to that happy place of my youth.

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Those green forgotten valleys,No longer can be seenLying hidden behind the tall fir and larchThat have made these brown hills greenRelentlessly marching down the hillsBurying everything in their wakeThe dead are long gone from this placeThe pike no longer in the lakeThe houses just hollow shells nowWhere the past ghosts eerily throughThe vacant windows and doorsWith rotted frames and jambs that once were new.Back then there was no silence, only the soundOf human laughter, and bird-calls to each otherThe dogs growling at a wayward sheep.And children’s scrapes kissed better by their motherNature is having the last laugh nowSoon there will be no trace of us at allAs the trees come marching down the hillsideNo one hears the lonesome curlew’s call.