Poem Of The Week 'Song Of Limerick Town' by Desmond O Grady

Desmond O Grady with Barney Sheehan

A Song Of Limerick Town
for Anette Reeves

We, in the fishblue hours
Of clockstrike early morning;
Sleep in the househuddled doors
Of our eyes, love in our yawning;

Stole through the sailorless streets
Of the still, caught-cuddling town,
Where seabedded fishing fleet sleeps
Fast in the arms of ‘Down

Anchors, all hands ashore.’
And now, here with the bulk
Of our talk from the hours before,
Here with the sulking hulks

Of ships, when no bells fore
Or aft will bang in the ears
Of morning and the town clock
Hoarsely churns its gears.

We are made one. I
With the man of the Limerick town
And you with the Shannon stream;
Made one till all doing is done.

Desmond O'Grady was born in Limerick, Ireland, in 1935. He left during the 1950s to teach and write in Paris, Rome and America where he took his doctorate at Harvard while a Teaching Fellow there. He has also taught at the American University in Cairo and the University of Alexandria, Egypt. During the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, while teaching in Rome, he was a founder member of the European Community of Writers, European editor of The Transatlantic Review, and organised the Spoleto International Poetry Festival. Now he lives in Kinsale, Co. Cork. His publications number seventeen collections of poetry, including The Road Taken: Poems 1956 – 1996 and The Wandering Celt, ten collections of translated poetry, among them Trawling Tradition: Translations 1954 – 1994 and Selected Poems of C. P. Cafavy, and prose memoirs of his literary acquaintances and friends. He is a member of Ireland’s Aosdána. He will read at the Feile na Bealtaine festival in Dingle on Sat. 13th May at 11.00am.