This little house beside the road
Now screened by fir trees tall
Was home to T K Whitaker
A famous man withal
I met him twice, a gracious man
He showed me round his place
With mammy and Sarah in the mix
We viewed this house of grace
For this is old Glencullen school
Where children came to learn
From Muinguinaun and Bangor side
And mostly from the glen
And here my mammy went to school
For ten years I suppose
Or maybe nine I do not know
But the ledgers would disclose
I read them once the day I came
And climbed in through a window
And saw her absences from school
Though few and far between so
She loved her school days that I know
She learned to read and write there
Lamb’s tales of Shakespeare and the Gaelic tongue
And poetry by the yard there
And when I a child she sat me down
And started to recite
Her tales of Brian Boru went on
And on and on all night
The poems I heard from mammy’s lips
Took root inside my heart
My earliest education then
Had a true Glencullen start
All through the years my mammy gave
Her recitations grand
She could not sing or hold a note
But poems were her command
And on her death bed when I came
To visit that last time
I asked again for that poem she had
And could she say the rhyme
And lying still now in her bed
Her voice rose up to say
The words I’d heard so long ago
When I a child at play
‘Old scenes, old songs, old friends again
The vale and the cot I was born in
O, Ireland, up from my heart of hearts
I bid you the top of the morning’
My mammy is gone from this world now
But still I hear her sighing
For the glen she loved when she went to school
And the corncrake in the morning
Brian Fahy
25 June 2017
Erris Poetry 