Turlach's web site - Donagh MacDonagh section

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Donagh MacDonagh (1912-1968) was a noted poet who grew interested in the utility of verse in the theatre and was successful with Happy as Larry, God's Gentry and Step-in-the-Hollow as well as Lady Spider which occupied him from 1956 to 1958.

His published poetry includes Twenty Poems, published privately with Niall Sheridan, Veterans (Cuala Press), The Hungry Grass (Faber and Faber) and A Warning to Conquerors (Dolmen Press).

He took his BA and MA in English Literature at University College Dublin and concurrently read for the bar at King's Inn in Dublin, taking his BA and being called to the bar in a matter of three years.

He practised law for ten years and sat as a District Justice for over twenty years. He was a son of the martyred poet and patriot Thomas MacDonagh of the Easter Rising in 1916

On the Bridge of Athlone: A Prophecy

I SEE them a mother and daughter
At dusk in a grass-grown lane An old road from nowhere to nowhere Where time has been slain A mother and daughter ragged And brown as a bird on a tree Hair tangled and coarse as the bushes Eye clear as the sea And the land is a sea all about them A green sea of grasses and trees A pole like the mast of a wrecked ship Trails its wires in the breeze And the only things living are insects And rabbits grown strong again And the women haggard as madmen From hunger and rain And the daughter comes running and crying I saw on the Bridge of Athlone A man O mother a man there And he's passed and is gone again. And men are so few now in Ireland That mother and daughter cry As one might mourn the last angel A kingfisher gone by And they weep for the land that is desolate Green and empty that once was hard won Lot's daughters with no Lot and no wine-cup To get them a son.

Donagh MacDonagh

Dublin Made Me

Dublin made me and no little town
With the country closing in on its streets
The cattle walking proudly on its pavements The jobbers, the gombeenmen and the cheats

Devouring the fair-day between them
A public-house to half a hundred men
And the teacher, the solicitor and the bank-clerk
In the hotel bar drinking for ten.

Dublin made me, not the secret poteen still
The raw and hungry hills of the West
The lean road flung over profitless bog
Where only a snipe could nest

Where the sea takes its tithe of every boat.
Bawneen and currach have no allegiance of mine,
Nor the cute self-deceiving talkers of the South
Who look to the East for a sign.

The soft and dreary midlands with their tame canals
Wallow between sea and sea, remote from adventure
And Northward a far and fortified province
Crouches under the lash of arid censure.

I disclaim all fertile meadows, all tilled land
The evil that grows from it and the good,
But the Dublin of old statutes, this arrogant city
Stirs proudly and secretly in my blood.

Donagh MacDonagh

Love in an Herb Garden

Under September's temperate Westering sun The garden slumbers and is overrun Where the sun was bright as goldenrod We found that love's the only garden God. I was the scarlet runner who ran down Your columbine, no sage was I but clown, A common fennel, wild in a wild thyme, Who comfrey found to salsify his prime. You were my lovage - sweet as coriander You were my applemint and my pomander; Your maidenhair unshorn, your aspect calm And to my catmint stare your eyes were balm. Alas, a black horehound was on our track Wormwood and baneberry launched their attack My love lay bleeding then and turned to rue And where the basil shone, the mugwort grew. The celandine deflowered and shrivelled up Elder and bitter bane were in my cup Angelica whose colours had been fine Turned nicotine - as did my columbine. And yet when Spring with customary rain Wakens the herbs, I know we will love again And in the middle of the brick lined town The God of gardens turn us upside down.

Donagh MacDonagh

The Hungry Grass

Not: It is a common belief in Ireland that anyone

who steps on a famine grave will have the strength sucked from their body by the hungry bones underneath Crossing the shallow holdings high above sea Where few birds nest, the luckless foot may pass From the bright safety of experience Into the terror of the hungry grass. Here in a year when poison from the air First withered in despair the growth of spring Some skull-faced wretch whom nettle could not save Crept on four bones to his last scattering, Crept, and the shrivelled heart which drove his thought Towards platters brought in hospitality Burst as the wizened eyes measured the miles Like dizzy walls forbidding him the city. Little the earth reclaimed from that poor body And yet remembering him the place has grown Bewitched and the thin grass he nourishes

Racks with his famine, sucks marrow from the bone.

Donagh MacDonagh

Going to Mass Last Steady

(Tune: The Lowlands of Holland) GOING to Mass last Sunday my true love passed me by, I knew her mind was altered by the rolling of her eye; And when I stood in God's dark light my tongue could word no prayer Knowing my saint had fled and left her reliquary bare. Sweet faces smiled from holy glass, demure in saintly love, Sweet voices ripe with Latin grace rolled from the choir above; But brown eyes under Sunday wear were all my liturgy; How can she hope for heaven who has so deluded me ? When daffodils were altar gold her lips were light on mine And when the hawthorn blame was bright we drank the year's new wine; The nights seemed stained-glass windows lit with love that paled the sky, But love's last ember perishes in the winter of her eye. Drape every downcast day now in purple cloth of Lent, Smudge every forehead now with ash, that she may yet repent, Who going to Mass last Sunday could pass so proudly by

And show her mind was altered by the rolling of an eye.

Donagh MacDonagh

A Warning to Conquerors

This is the country of the Norman tower The graceless keep, the bleak and slitted eye Where fear drove comfort out; straw on the floor Was price of conquering security. They came and won, and then for centuries Stood to their arms; the face grew bleak and lengthened In the night vigil, while their foes at ease Sang of the strangers and the towers they strengthened. Ragweed and thistle hold the Norman field And cows the hall where Gaelic never rang Melodiously to harp or spinning-wheel. Their songs are spent now with the voice that sang; And lost their conquest. This soft land quietly Engulfed them like the Saxon and the Dane But kept the jutted brow, the slitted eye- Only the faces and the names remain.

Donagh MacDonagh