ST Patrick’s Day is a time to reflect on what is Irish and what is Ireland, present day and long before line divided or saint brazened a crozier. Desmond O’Grady, dead less than a year, had fair scope as a poet and thinker. His work, ‘The Old Head of Kinsale Says’, does not yield to weather, politic or opinion.
The Old Head of Kinsale Says
I’m here in the Atlantic a long time:/ two hundred and fifty million years
My first and only tenants were migrant Celts/ from the Mediterranean. They brought a light that/give safe passage to passerby sailors forever.
They left us in peace. Thus we have lived more than/ two thousand years. No change in my bent grass hair./
It dies, regrows annually. No change in chough,/ guillemot, gannet and fulmar, in kittiwake, razor-bill/ and skylark that play about my head. No change/ in bracken, bell heather and sea thrift in blossom/ nor in beef or beastie from beef bullock to pygmy shrew./
No change in the migrating mammals that swim my myth/ and no change in me, other than age’s natural weathering.
I have my natural heritage here. I shall keep it for mine./ A land it does does not preserve its heritage is not not a nation.
