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Joanne Heraghty Nov 2014
Yeats said romance was gone and dead,
Back in the day when most tears were shed.
Times when the IRA were up and strong,
Days when they could be seen doing wrong.
Not right now, when its just biased times;
The next Love/Hate enlightening their "newest" crimes.
Our time does differ from the old.
And if Yeats could talk right now, a different story would be told.

We're due a time when they all come home
Cross the shores and along they come.
Times when they are safe to stay,
Unlike the war years when they were forced away.
The times when Yeats said our heroes did us good.
Now, no novelty, no heroes: villains. Although, there should.
President Higgins, the 9th to stand.
Who speaks of "our own Aisling" in this shared land.
Our time does differ from the old.
And if Yeats could talk right now, a different story would be told.

A hundred years, we're still the same.
When the "recession" is so easy to blame.
A choice that Sinn Fein never got to make,
Lead by Kenny, the government's mistake.
Choices made, nor law but religion.
Medical misadventures under moral obligation.
A jury given a choice of two verdicts: one story,
Savita's death, goes down in history.
Our time does differ from the old.
And if Yeats could talk right now, a different story would be told.

Our time when networks send youths to their grave,
An earlier landing caused by how others behaved.
Still mothers shed tears upon the pit of their sons,
Ashes to ashes, a new war has begun.
But, a type that is different in a virtual way,
For the past is the past and today is today.
That's how our times differ to those of 1913
And if Yeats were here right now, what real difference would be seen?
22-April-2013

© All Rights Reserved Joanne Heraghty

This poem was written as a response to W. B. Yeats' poem; September 1913.
Joanne Heraghty Nov 2014
I make the choice to start the plane;
I mount my seat and turn the key.
I join the force in the rain:
To meet a certain destiny.
I know them not, those other men,
Nor enemy, nor ally do I fight.
If I could live it all again
I'd steer away from this final "delight."
I'd banish these thoughts that pois my mind,
And discourage the little man inside.
Too rash I was to leave it all behind,
And venture off to the clouds to hide.
Distant are Kiltartan's men, at noon.
Heartbroken; Margaret and the three;
She may receive the dreaded telegram soon;
Because mine the falling aeroplane shall be.
Through the glass, I can see them ones,
Those times of pain, and those of smiles.
Tears jam in my throat like stones,
As I continue my journey on for miles.
It's clear you question my choice to die,
Needlessly, you assume, within your poem.
But, you see, I just love being in the sky..
It feels a little more like home.
11 April 2014

© All Rights Reserved Joanne Heraghty

This poem was written as a response to W. B. Yeats' poem; An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.
Mark Ball Oct 2014
The sea is
to me
As to Yeats Inisfree.
C S Cizek Oct 2014
The actors that did not shirk
their lines before death
were the ones most deserving
of life.
I've been analyzing and reanalyzing Yeats' "Lapis Lazuli" for my Modern & Contemporary Poetry class, and I put this an essay I'm writing on the poem. I'm so hung up on it.
Preston Jul 2014
In the waking hours of another time,
Man sees triumph over life itself,
On one shore, they cracked the code of being,
And on the other merged us with cold earth,
While beneath the ground, in vials brewed,
The outcasts and exiles released their emotions in skin renewed.

As man grew weary of the other side,
Plans were drawn and deals were made,
In order to control our unified mind,
And on that day, black ships blotted the sun
Monstrosities rained down, amalgams of man and animal,
And met with constructs of men who shined in the light.

While war was sewn throughout the world,
The underground heaved, and spilled out of their refuse,
With freaks that were the shed direct from emotion itself,
Zombies who could not speak such was their rage,
And men without hair, who could cure you with your faith alone.

While the world blew itself apart,
As the Changed raged and died,
Trying to show the other side that it had always been right,
Millions of people throw up prayers,
Praying that God would have pity on them all,
That he would not see fit to start the Second Coming.

And while the world is crashing to its end,
A small gathering descend to Earth,
Beings of other worlds and kinds,
And they slowly begin to cry,
As children with fire dance beyond the horizon,
And journey’s end.
written a few years ago for British Literature, homage to W.B. Yeats "the Second Coming"
Martin Narrod Apr 2014
angry men who do not know I do not have a dollar or a cig to spare. Ugly irrefutable contagion-handed howlers. Angry mischievous heathens that pantomime on 6:00a.m. sidewalk, Wicker Park gallow stop-sign, choreographed gutter-punk drunk walk. And of all he wants and could ever want splits down his gooey membrane brain in the outline of a noun shaped fragment of a clause, "Couldja spare 80¢ for the train," but of course I don't spare on the ellipsis or the period. Semi-colons I won't! My rubber-bottomed leather boots lash out, heavy scraping sounds trail this mirrored shadow half an angle behind me.

*****!! Blonde framed sunglasses from American Apparel, a gift from my sister in a folded Ray-Ban case is scattered on last nights bedroom floor, my girlfriend has certainly not noticed, the gloom-coated morning sun spray has not noticed; but I have unzipped a fissure in the ocular lens. My heart skips a beat. Her bedroom might as well have swallowed them whole. Now the house can halt and have the shade, swaying in Spring air in 10:22a.m. shadows. The aviator himself Howard Hughes would strike me with his 488 aircraft. Edwin Starr in his invincible sinister calypso of War would turn me round. I was sturdy as a rock until I began to forget my forgottens. These unknown unknowns I knew I needed. I'm over a quarter-century on to noon going nowhere- and quite blindly.

But then, still she could stand upright and find me. Her neck crooked, looking onward through the East, the gristly roots of rhubarb buried in her searching fingernails. She's threaded worse, and of course if I could just tell her- this is the kind of nursing which requires acute temperament and flexibility. I am thus on a journey to strike nonsense and fear from the idiotic vocabulary that put this nonsense in my head. Split through me like a butter knife into my apotropaic. Perhaps tar water could cure my ails. If not, certainly a sliver of vanilla would set me straight. Or if could just rain rain rain all day, then I'd make do without, but she is at school. My pistons are racked and nervous, and I'm not going anywhere but my rucksack stoop. I am camped in midwestern Spring soup. Fog, rain, and shade. The nightmare of day.
Inspired by William Butler Yeats 'Beautiful Lofty Things'

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