McTaggart Feb 9th 2011


A real horse of a man McTaggart
Called him nineteen hands high,
With shoulders like a barn door,
Town lands champion, miser and horse doctor.
Focus of all the neighborhood shallow gossip,
Uncle Eddy strode Brucha’s rushy aches alone
for eighty years to outlive them all,
Unschooled and illerate, a product of lean times,
He could guide a team of Clydesdales at twelve,
At fifteen a man.
He bought his first suit with rabbits snared on the loch shore.

Rebuffed a sullen parish admired his feats from a safe distance,
Fearing the hard honesty, the cold stare.
As when he mowed all night in the wet meadow,
lifted a trap across his bare shoulders,
broke stallions or drove a herd of bullocks to the Moy Fair alone.
Well able for pestering clergy,
Friendless and womanless all his life,
He christened the great bays, Tom and Ned

Laid out two policemen at Finigan’s republican funeral, they said.
Finally as lawyers and priests came to count his money,
And the whole parish waited triumphantly for his final feat.
He chased doctors and priests from his deathbed.
Wanting only that the workman bring the horses to the window so that he could see them.

Feb 9th, 2011