March / Patrick Kavanagh

March

There's a wind blowing
Cold through the corridors,
A ghost-wind,
The flapping of defeated wings,
A hell-fantasy
From meadows damned
To eternal April

And listening, listening
To the wind
I hear
The throat-rattle of dying men,
From whose ears oozes
Foamy blood,
Throttled in a brothel.

I see brightly
In the wind vacancies
Saint Thomas Aquinas
And
Poetry blossoms
Excitingly
As the first flower of truth.

~~
Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967)
from Ploughman, and other poems, 1936

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada]

Patrick Kavanagh biography

Peieris, photo of Kavanagh monument, Dublin, 2012. CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons.