A poem a day keeps the doctor away
The latest news I hear
A word of wisdom word of cheer
Word to inspire
Cast out fear
Words to help you find your way
To help you just get through today
Tell me your diagnosis true
I’ll find the verse that right for you
I never bothered much before
With poetry and verse
Lectures and essays and sermons
Homilies of course
Earnest lives their words outpour
Takes us some time to learn the score
The less you say you might say more
The longer so much worse
Rabbie Burns I knew of course
He knew the power of words and curse
And humour was at his command
To scatter humbug from the land
And mammy’s poetry remained
Ingrained in me as oft you see
But other poets I left alone
How can their trifling words atone
For all the ills this world allows
We have raised voices
Come to blows
Public discourse has seen better days
But Peter Kay I gladly praise
For he enacts the way we are
Like distorting mirrors -That’s not me
O yes it is come and see
And now in these my later days
I lay aside prosaic ways
And turn to verse and simple rhyme
To talk to you and maybe chime
For poetry can capture things
Like feelings sentiments and bring
Poignant pause and nails on heads
And move the heart where heavy tread
Leaves only heaviness
One day I hope to write a line
To capture beauty there
And for a moment hold it fine
A butterfly in my hands sublime
And release it in the air
Brian Fahy
22 October 2021
+ William Sieghart calls himself the ‘poetry pharmacist’, at a Book Week Northern Ireland in Belfast. Poems can be medicinal and can really make us better.
Erris Poetry 