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NJ McGourty Dec 2012
I
In a land of myths, from the jaded isle,
Great stories are told of the brave and the guile.
But no legend of druids, of hags or ghouls,
Can compare to that of our own Fionn McCool.
In the province of Ulster, before armalite,
There lived a race of warriors who knew how to fight.
And who was their leader? The fiercest of the feared?
Of course it was Fionn! With his glorious ginger beard.
He had arms like a gorilla, at an impressive 8 feet,
And lived on a diet of very rare meat.
He drank only water he squeezed from stone,
And discovered 47 uses for human bone.
It was his giant strength that brought McCool his fame,
In kingdoms far and wide people knew his name.
But what was less renowned was his mental might.
Aul Fionn had towering intellect and wit to match his height.

II
When news of Fionn's exploits reached a pub in Aberdeen,
A mammoth figure emerged from the pungent, men’s latrine.
The patrons gave a shudder as it stooped through the door,
“O...One more Ben?” stuttered the barman as his **** reached the floor.
The giant gave a shout and wretched a toilet door aloft,
“Who scrieved this scaffy drawin, sayin that I’m soft?”
Silence gripped the bar as the men examined with horror,
A crude etching of Fionn McCool thrashing Benandonner.
The men remained mute, as the giant turned carmine,
“You think this Fionn boyo’s tough, I’ll carve out his spine!”
And so the giant departed, making his way west,
But not before he slaughtered the group and downed the drinks they left.

III
A roaring voice came through the mist and reached our own Fionn’s ear,
But when he reached the Antrim coast, he near ****** himself with fear
Seeing Ben on Scotland’s edge, throwing boulders to the sea,
“I’ll turn yer lungs to bagpipes! Ye feeble wee beastie!”
Fionn trembled before the monster, twice as big as he,
With a chest as wide as a trawler and biceps thick as trees.
Now Fionn was not a coward but nor was he a fool,
As the rocks formed a bridge he saw ‘the late Fionn McCool.’
And so he sparked a plan to deceive the creature,
A plot in which his wisdom and his wife would feature.
Running to his house he rushed to build a crib,
And dressed as an infant to complete the fib.

IV
With the last stone in place, Ben crossed the sea,
With ‘murrrdur’ in his heart, his eyes mad with hateful glee.
He crouched to enter the house after kicking through the door,
Grabbing Oonagh in his hand, “Now where’s yer husband *****?!”
Fionn’s wife was calm as he held her off the ground,
But wretched as she smelt the breath of a gum-diseased hound.
“He’ll return soon,” she said as the shoes fell off her feet.
“but put me down and while you wait I’ll fix you something to eat”
While Oonagh was in the kitchen, Big Ben released a smirk,
“From the size of his wife, killing McCool won’t be much work.”
Oonagh lead the deception, returning with some cake.
But had placed rocks in the batter, before she’d begun to bake.
Benadonner was surprised, when he took his first bite,
He reached into his mouth and removed a pearly white.
Not wanting to seem weak, by refusing a McCool snack,
The giant continued to eat the stones until all his teeth had cracked.

V
Gumming back a sob, the brute looked around,
He spied the crib in the corner, and was disturbed by what he found.
A child sleeping soundly, but of such monstrous size,
Ben, now blind with tears was fooled by Fionn’s disguise.
Coughing to hide his alarm, the Scottish giant inquired.
“Is Fionn McCool the man, to whom this weeun is sired?”
Oonagh laughed and replied, “He’s his father’s son, no doubt.”
“Sure I remember he was six foot four when I popped him out.”
Now the Scot started sweating, THE BABY WAS FECKIN TITANIC!
When he imagined the father’s size the goliath began to panic.
He ran from the house, kilt flapping in the wind,
As McCool watched from his window, he kissed his wife and grinned.

VI
While Ben crossed the bridge, he dismantled his creation,
To ensure the ****** couldn’t follow, he divorced the nations.
Now centuries later, if you need proof today,
The remains of Ben’s bridge is called the Giant’s Causeway.
NJ McGourty May 2013
They look upon your brindle bake
and break the silence with their spite
it whips across the troubled air
and cracks upon your crescent mouth.
It lingers there for just a time
but now lost to the crowd,
how fortunate are we to see
the best of Ballyshannon Brown
NJ McGourty Mar 2013
In the glass I glimpsed her eyes
they flitted over dappled cream,
but expectation became a cloud
and so fogged her face from me.
I glanced about my forgone haunt
of candy stripe and lino check,
a board on which I could predict
the movements of her interest.
You cannot taste frozen chocolate
or those rainbow splinters.
Yet she was snared in naive thought
and caught in coloured winter.
They make it all round back you know,
But actually they don’t.
They make a cracked kaleidoscope,
its sight is skewed and bitter.
NJ McGourty May 2013
October brings a flurry of trigger-happy handymen
to carpet over the potholes, puddles and last year’s cloth
with that emerald bract that’s rusted in seasons past and
now swarms in copper opulence.

I often wondered why sky’s most subtle inclinations
did not bleach the meadows into hues of tarnished brass
but will glaciate them rather than pull at the soil’s gums.

How I would thread a coat from those discarded teeth
and wear them out before they abandoned me.
Elk
NJ McGourty Jun 2013
Elk
Mounted in Ulster Mausoleum
you greet me with your rotted smile,
with oaken bones splinted into pose
with cloven feet riveted to the floor.

To the side your cratered eyes
that tunnel down to your cage
that watches of how we feed,
that recognises skin, fur and hair.

that will keep to see,
waves crash on mountain peaks
and we, holding hands in barren fields
and no one finding fossils in the mud.
NJ McGourty May 2013
Mauve block of US is
frozen butter on soft bread
it won’t spread smoothly.


Nelson’s wee brother
cries gravel tears, Why can’t I
be more like Nelson?


The countless that has
lain in you are poppies now
beyond the stained glass
NJ McGourty Feb 2013
The mossy stitch of a concrete quilt can
cosy and tuck the gummy road. And should
we scrawl upon patchwork step, catching
skip in the slabby hopscotch ground.
Receding upon the pavement scalp
its riprap etching on our skin
where boredom breaks the cracked grins
left to trudge through polished tar
an asphalt crypt of broadbent muck.
But were I tried to argue stint
when waning wild and brittle at the knee
with a wary shuffle of aged feat?

Nevermore would you see
Flagstones on a seasoned street.
NJ McGourty Dec 2012
People in the sand
The tide, it heals the fresh scars
And leaves their salvage.


                                                      ­             Hard the seagull flew
                                                            ­       Gale working against her strife
                                                          ­         No, she does not move.


                  Hoary lines appear
                  The angler of Creevy Pier
                  Battling the sea.
NJ McGourty Dec 2012
I often pondered why we wore our studded boots,
When the mud was impenetrable with morning frost.
The same that misted our breath before our eyes,
that made our ice cube toes and splinted fingers,
that made us unable to tie the laces now lashing at our shins,
that made us dread every kick and made every catch distress.
There was no warm-up for our extremities, only pink S.O.S.
The probable pain of the individual,
With every pass lacking distance and every shot off the mark,
My belief was then what it is today,
that some are just not made for it or any other.
And now when I watch, I wish I never left.
To feel just once the joy of contest,
when the closest I can is...
a drink on Sunday afternoon.
NJ McGourty May 2013
Colonel Hathi with a hurl
that weighs in his illicit hands
like an AR18 play-park swing
and all at his command
are concrete soldiers he had left
to test the new recruits
with netted helmets drilled
into Private Sparky’s boots.

To detrimble and exhume
the cairns from the pyres
a jaded island from respite
and scripture from the flyers
but as he jumps the trenches
of his own conceited fame
he’ll turn a sharp three-sixty
and face the wall again.
NJ McGourty May 2013
Not the drip of freeway from Pittsburgh but a rough trundle
on chalk roads as flaxen skies shade to molten celluloid
and I can still see them

flash in August fields like a crop of traffic lights
they flare as hay-bale paparazzi or

floaters in the humour and hang
careless in seasonable decadence

so I’ll pass from the frigid, processed air
and join them in their closeness.

No buzz but a minor hum coming from the
moment’s luminosity and then they’re gone
making good on thunder’s empty promise.
NJ McGourty Dec 2012
I was too young to remember the day
when I first met Molly Malone,
that mile and a half of dark brook street
running to my home

That river is a constant,
never changing from wide and narrow,
‘Tween Queens and Drumbeg she twists and turns,
wheeling toward the barrow.

In the eve she rages a torrent,
at noon she is mild.
Her muscles that flexed to speed their way,
relax to coddle the child.

Has she always been a refuge?
In Belfast, fair city of war?
This night street is quiet now.
Was it ever Loughinisland, of 1994?

Why name her for a *****?
Compare the parallels
how the masses crowd and cram.
Only children follow her,
Maigh Lón, the plain of the lamb.
NJ McGourty Dec 2012
Am I in there with the crowd?
That stagnant incense and heavy heat.
As he watched a deaf head bowed,
Am I in there with the crowd?
Vision narrowed by infringing cloud.
To shelter outside on the moonless street.
Am I in there with the crowd?
That stagnant incense and heavy heat.

Can you hear my troubled mind?
So heavy the traffic inside my head.
To which my Christmas had resigned.
Can you hear my troubled mind?
The imperfect vessel he had designed,
inclined to follow and be misled.
Can you hear my troubled mind?
So heavy the traffic inside my head.

Did I believe I was there at all?
Back against the stained glass glow.
A slimy trail, pathetic and small.
Did I believe I was there at all?
Prayer as an orphan call.
Into the night, my prayers I throw.
Did I believe he was there at all?
Back against the stained glass glow.
NJ McGourty Dec 2012
Keep your kids away
from the  feathered rat.
That mangy, tarry bird,
living off their scraps.
That carrier of disease,
protruding as a cyst.
Its mangled talon clenched,
a red and permanent fist.

Iron hulled intruders.
Objective mystery.
Walking a confident strut,
name marred by history.
And is it not a pity?
most will not see,
an oily rainbow as it turns its neck,
and overlook a granite diplomacy.

Is it not something to admire?
Unique confidence?
At the feet of the bread-man,
only intransigence.
With ideals ignored,
can they not behold its spirit?
When a grey bird remains,
Why do I see its merit?
NJ McGourty May 2013
A Sunday and she will not eat
cabbage brew
or the plethora of stale mush
stuffed within
her trusty rusty biscuit tin
even tea stained
and netted dishcloths wane
like fossil flies
on toffee streamers that were baptized
with gravey drips
of the Irish stew from her whitewashed crypt
and papal’s sprogg
plays housies with the dog
we keep shtum .

When threadbare ears are in the room
cull the conversation cull
Go Moe less scale, leather hull
until our hallowed family makes
familiar curiosity and lemon cakes
she’s broke down so give her a push
Maybe ninety two.
It’s Monday and she will not eat.
‘Gabh mo leithscéal, le do thoil’ - ‘excuse me, please’
NJ McGourty May 2013
It sat upon Virginia’s shore
stalked by the sea,
it’s lichen pale with salt
bark that broke the sand,
a haggard frame stark against
the last horizon land.

The butchered stumps contaminate
a hacked and broken field,
their sapwood leaking silence,
the birds atop them mute,
crowned with their annual rings
of righteous guilt and root.

But there it waits branded by
the blight of unknown fear,
a desolation beacon
when the other trees were cleared,

by then it was decided
what pilgrim eyes would see
CROATOAN
scratched into the tree.

— The End —