Morning on Lough Eske, Donegal

Morning on Lough Eske, Donegal
 
Mist enveloped hills:
a collective shroud of the voices,
long lost to a troubled,
Irish past.
 
An evocation of distant memories.
 
For centuries, such vapours have steered
countless pens of rising emerald stars
into the literary firmament;
their words percolating the heady mix of
peat-smoked rooms, viewed through
deep draughts of snow-capped raven-black,
or the fiery fumes of malted amber.
 
Khayyam’s long-risen hunter forms
a pale ghost beyond the
dull, dank, dripping sentinels
on the lough’s unseen shore,
boughs swaying with the haunting,
faded strains of last evening’s
beaten bodrán and frenzied fiddle.
 
Omnipresent echoes of unrequited expectation.
 
 
© Copyright 2008 Robert M Jaggs-Fowler