The Mournes
I shall not go to heaven when I die.
But if they let me be
I think I'll take a road I used to know
That goes by Slieve-na-garagh and the sea.
And all day breasting me the wind will blow,
And I'll hear nothing but the peewit's cry
And the sea talking in the caves below.
I think it will be winter when I die
(For no one from the North could die in spring)
And all the heather will be dead and grey,
And the bog-cotton will have blown away,
And there will be no yellow on the wind.
But I shall smell the peat,
And when it's almost dark I'll set my feet
Where a white track goes glimmering to the hills,
And see, far up, a light
--Would you think Heaven could be so small a thing
As a lit window on the hills at night?--
And come in stumbling from the gloom,
Half-blind, into a firelit room.
Turn, and see you,
And there abide.If it were true,
And if I thought that they would let me be,
I almost wish it were tonight I died."
Thanks to Rosemary Plakas for searching for the words to Michael's favorite poem.Rosemary indicates the poem was in the book Helen Waddell, a Biography by Felicitas Corrigan. London, 1986, pp 222-223.
"Helen Waddell (1889-1965), who grew up in Northern Ireland near the Mourne Mountains, sent one of her poems to Gladys Bendit(pen-name John Presland) with this undated covering letter:
'I think it was written in January of 1925. I'd come home to Ireland from Paris, very sleepless and weary, with a mass of material without form or cohesion: and I'd been at Kilmacrew for three weeks at Christmastime, and dragged myself away from it to an attic flat in St. Edmund's Terrace [London] . . .I went to bed, defeated and doubting, and as I lay in the dark it seemed as if I heard a voice speaking, and it was saying this fragment of verse, and in the morning I remembered & wrote it down.'"