O Donall og, if you go across the sea, bring myself with you and do
not forget it; and you will have a sweetheart for fair days and market
days, and the daughter of the King of Greece beside you at night. It
is late last night the dog was speaking of you; the snipe was speaking
of you in her deep marsh. It is you are the lonely bird through the
woods; and that you may be without a mate until you find me.
You promised me, and you said a lie to me, that you would be before
me where the sheep are flocked; I gave a whistle and three hundred
cries to you, and I found nothing there but a bleating lamb.
You promised me a thing that was hard for you, a ship of gold under
a silver mast; twelve towns with a market in all of them, and a fine
white court by the side of the sea.
You promised me a thing that is not possible, that you would give me
gloves of the skin of a fish; that you would give me shoes of the skin
of a bird, and a suit of the dearest silk in Ireland.
O Donall og, it is I would be better to you than a high, proud,
spendthrift lady: I would milk the cow; I would bring help to you;
and if you were hard pressed, I would strike a blow for you.
O, ochone, and it’s not with hunger or with wanting food, or drink,
or sleep, that I am growing thin, and my life is shortened; but it
is the love of a young man has withered me away.
It is early in the morning that I saw him coming, going along the road
on the back of a horse; he did not come to me; he made nothing of me;
and it is on my way home that I cried my fill.
When I go by myself to the Well of Loneliness, I sit down and I go
through my trouble; when I see the world and do not see my boy, he
that has an amber shade in his hair.
It was on that Sunday I gave my love to you; the Sunday that is last
before Easter Sunday. And myself on my knees reading the Passion; and
my two eyes giving love to you for ever.
O, aya! my mother, give myself to him; and give him all that you have
in the world; get out yourself to ask for alms, and do not come back
and forward looking for me.
My mother said to me not to be talking with you to-day, or to-morrow,
or on the Sunday; it was a bad time she took for telling me that; it
was shutting the door after the house was robbed.
My heart is as black as the blackness of the sloe, or as the black
coal that is on the smith’s forge; or as the sole of a shoe left in
white halls; it was you put that darkness over my life.
You have taken the east from me; you have taken the west from me;
you have taken what is before me and what is behind me; you have taken
the moon, you have taken the sun from me; and my fear is great that
you have taken God from me!
(Lady Augusta Gregory)
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Based on Topics: Love Poems, Life Poems, World Poems, Night Poems, Youth Poems, Kings & Queens Poems, Sleep Poems, Fear Poems, Gold Poems, Birds Poems, Morning PoemsBased on Keywords: sloe, ochone, aya