No more as from a golden throne
I’ll gaze from gorse clad Brishmacree
Or Culnaheena, Barnasone
Or Carrickascoppal dear to me.
No more I’ll plough for daily bread
The Foremass fields of dark brown clay,
For Fate ordains that I must tread
The exile’s long and lonely way.
But haply yet beyond the foam
When slumber sets my spirit free
In dreams I’ll see the hills of home
Bernish, Foremass and Cracrawee.
Often in dreams I’ll rove the lanes
Of Shane and Cuilnaheena when
The lights are bright through window panes
From Mullaghbrack to Bernish Glen.
Michael Mullin
‘The Bard of Foremass’
Foremass Lower, Sixmilecross, Co. Tyrone.
Forget your useless yearnings and your worries and your pride
And join our friendly ceilidh by a Foremass fireside.
We’ll make a semicircle round the open Irish hearth,
The dearest and the sweetest spot in all the wide wide earth.
We’ll seek the pathways of the past, on Memory’s omnibus
We’ll tell the younger folk the yearns our fathers told to us,
And if you have no funny yarns or wondrous tales to spin
Just cross your legs and light your pipe, relax and listen in.
We’ll introduce a ghost or two and resurrect some elves
While the firelight dances brightly on the dresser’s shining shelves
With neighbours teasing neighbours, friends making fun of friends,
Till our laughter shakes each rafter and with the night wind blends.
And while we talk of lots of things from love to war and hate
We’ll throw a pinch of gossip in to keep it up-to-date.
Thus with the key of comradeship the door we open wide
Into the home of happiness, a Foremass fireside.
Michael Mullin
‘The Bard of Foremass’
Foremass Lower, Sixmilecross, Co. Tyrone.
26TH March 1957
FOOTNOTE FROM HIS SON P.D.- By a Foremass Fireside – in country parts anyone who travelled outside of their own part of the county was expected to come back and tell some tall tales of their travels and most of them could exaggerate a bit. Like a cattle dealer who travelled to fairs all over the country and told of the corn growing in a farm in Ashbourne, Co. Meath where you would have to take three steps back to pull a handful of corn from the stack. The corn in Co. Meath may grow taller than the corn in Foremass but not as tall as the tales we were told. Such was the fun of the talk around the fireside in Foremass or indeed any Irish fireside.
O Let me dream beside one stream
Where song and beauty blend
Where banks and bowers are beds of flowers
And every field my friend
And every wind my minstrel kind
Each lot a picture card
Each tree a lyre, each grove a choir
And each song bird a bard.
O place me where the open air
In daytime is divine
And I shall not begrudge their lot
Who dwell in Castles fine
And when I die, O let me lie
Within a hill above
A vale serene and sweet and green
The vale I dearly love.
Michael Mullin
‘The Bard of Foremass’
Foremass Lower, Sixmilecross, Co. Tyrone.
FOOTNOTE: The last four lines of this poem describe the graveyard in Dunmoyle where Michael Mullin ‘The Bard of Foremass’ is buried just inside the gate on the right hand side.