Subject: Lyr Add: THE PLANETS SEVEN (Joseph Mary Plunkett)
From:
McGrath of Harlow
Date: 08 Feb 00 - 09:35 PM
Joseph Mary Plunkett. I've got a battered selection of his poems I picked up in a junk shop in Clonmel. It must have been printed fairly soon after he was shot - because it talks of him as being dead, buit never mentions the circumstances of his death. Wartime censorship I imagine.
Anyway, here's a ballad he wrote that's included in the introduction written by his sister Geraldine. I've never seen it anywhere else:
THE PLANETS SEVEN
(Joseph Mary Plunkett)
The planets seven that swing through Heaven
On a golden tether round their Lord the Sun,
Are not so humble, but they sometimes grumble,
That their life is humdrum with but little fun.
Though that shining sickle the moon's not fickle,
Yet she's sometimes mickle and more times less,
But my love, my blessing, would give them a lesson
Both the stars and crescent in graciousness.
There's many a flower in a heavy shower
Would say that its hour of grief was black
And the bearded barley would take it hardly
In the morning early to be cut and stacked;
The silver herring off the coast of Kerry
Is not so merry to meet with death,
But my love, my children, she would beguile them
With her easy smiling while he stopped their breath.
If the stars lack teachers, or ever a preacher
To recall the creatures to the ways of God,
Let them cease to whistle and come and listen
Kneeling like Christians upon the sod;
Then Saint Columba will shake the slumber
Of Death that cumbers their tired eyes
And my love will glance with a look entrancing
And send them dancing to Paradise.
"The flowers of heaven and earth are the same flowers."
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sj
