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.
