JINGLE ON MY SON!

JINGLE ON MY SON!
A doughty champion of his local culture.(Poet Tom Hubbard)Your performance at the city hall was soooooooooo good! Christoph thought it was excellent! (Carolyn)

30.8.16

DANCING IN FERMOY




























 




We're dancing in Fermoy tonight,

the Blackwater

shivers in the rippling dark

and a piper twinkles with glee.

Now I’d like to romp with a Fermoy lass

in a restless bed of rebel poems.

I’d like her to pirouette in dreams

all the way down MacCurtain Street

and in the back of Murphy’s Pub.

Can you see how Michael Flatley skips 

in the footsteps of martyrs and Mattie Feerick?

Through the military barracks,

he upsets the garrison with his mighty feet

and throws a party with his legs 

in Castle Hyde

for flitting artists only,

just those 

with a lilt in their bones.

So we’re dancing in Fermoy tonight:

a show of skipping

to bring a throb to your blood.

So dance with me

and the local librarian;

we’ll smooch behind the shelves of light,

spark social change

with a twirl of the hips

in the flipping manuscripts.

It’s wet and cold

but the whiskey leaps

and the fiddle cries

and the room is flowing with poems.

You know I dance 

everywhere I go in the world

but there’s something special

in a Fermoy prance

and the dashing river

that’s awash with the salmon

in the heart of this bobbing town.

And John Anderson, that builder of swirling veins, 

reels through my nightmares

lubricated with history’s passages 

and the staggering rhymes

of a tiny life 

spent larking in sun and moonlight.

Along Little William O’Brien Street

and up Oliver Plunkett Hill,

I’m simply dancing in Fermoy,

up to my eyes in joy.







KEITH ARMSTRONG,



Fermoy,

Ireland.

the jingling geordie

My photo
whitley bay, tyne and wear, United Kingdom
poet and raconteur