I love to listen to the rushing gale –
A giant wild rejoiced to be at large –
Careering blindly over hill and vale,
Striking obstructions in its headlong charge.

It whistles through the keyholes of the doors,
Rattles the windows, beats against the walls,
Howls round the house, and in the chimney roars;
“Delay me not”, impatiently it calls.

With music grand and terrible are filled
The forests when it strikes them in its rage.
Trees sympathetic to the mood are thrilled
By this blind Harper on his pilgrimage.

But oh! its sweetest music, to my ears
Is when it whistles through a whin topped fence:
Its song is then a song of childhood’s years,
Of childhood’s hopes, and childhood’s innocence.

MICHAEL MULLIN, ‘THE BARD OF FOREMASS,
Foremass Lower, Sixmilecross. Co. Tyrone