Status Updates From Poems Selected by Seamus He...

Druid. Look on my thin grey hair and hollow cheeks
And on these hands that may not lift the sword,
This body trembling like a wind-blown reed.
No woman's loved me, no man sought my help.

Fergus. A king is but a foolish labourer
Who wastes his blood to be another's dream.

For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
from a world more full of weeping than he
can understand.

I will pray no more with the smooth stones:
when life in my body has ceased –
For lonely to move ‘mong the soft eyes of best ones a sad thing were –
I will go to the house of the Fenians, be they in flames or at feast,
To Fin, Caolte, and Conan, and Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair.