The Lady of the Poets

The Lady of the Poets
and
other draft verses
of

P. Kavanagh
Inniskeen
Dundalk

Given
to his host
John Gawsworth at
33 Great James St, London
1938

You have posessed [sic] me distressed me in my nine mood muses
I walk around the jail parade ring till your third degree bruises
Are a bloody net about my shoulders
The gravel under my bare feet is the shingle
From the brimstone boulders.

He is training his colt
The Man in the Moon
I can see where the hooves have beaten down
A clear round ring
Can it be this thing
Forbodes rainfall soon?

I stand to-night
Leg-deep in ripened white
Grasses that excite
Glow fires of mind
And blind
Bat-winged I rise
A bat,
Where little star-eyes
Round gables peer
For wondering at.

O Lady of the lonely and unloved,
You are unmoved
By the lean anguish of a poet's cry - 
You have heard so many greater than I.

To J. G.


    Slowly slowly emerge
    From the fog-sensibility
    Of affection too human
    In the [thin] rational day is tranquility

    Lest Bull of the fog
    High-horned upon you rushes,
    Fly to a hill-point
    Where love is a comic trifle that no child crushes.

Come closer
Let us feel
In our finger-tips the vibrant beauty
Of a winter sunset.
The cold glass shines
And reasonable innocence
Tells us not to prise open
The sealed trunk

Do you see those clouds now?

I know that I have heard
A truth so different 
That I had no word
To fold it in with sense.

From my people I went
To the land hinted
In primrose and bluebell tint
In the song sung or printed
I turned eastward to find
A land pledged
To no daemon of the mind
By no destiny edged.

In these grey fields
I heard the cry

Come closer friend
Let us feel
That we have not emptied out our hearts
Like turf out of a creel.