Pilgrimage (a poem)

A Meditation (slightly after Yeats):

Deep in the woods, the water black, and under a pelting rain, I pilgrim in Yeats's footsteps.

His cadences lilt like the bards of old, not quite the angular American masculinity of my home.

Instead, a silver-tipped, older tongue - an Irish one like the odes to a beautiful maiden

In the Irish National Museum.

I didn't know whether that lilting Irish ode - was it a political decision? Nationalism and all that? - an ode to an ethereal woman

On full display, the lift-up nodes usually only reserved for the young.

Lilting, like the dai-dee-doodle-doodle-dum

Which fills in the spaces Which invites the imagination.

I feel like I know this poem in her original Middle Irish:

Swift syllables, not a Norman's praise of his Dane.

A dance, not a march, not plodding.

Just like the dance of the Elvish - songs and stories beside the fireside.

I'm sure there were Boasts - not just by the Vikings but also the Irish men about their various fleshy conquests - like the American men I hear on the sidewalks.

But - the Irish softness is a fond familiar -

Not just to me

but to my history.

A Celtic angel in a Dominican Abbey built in 1254!

Sunburst detail on a headstone.

The river walk around Sligotown.