Lough Nasool

Framed by gorsed fields and evergreen
coppices thriving in the cool,
there lies a prehistoric scene:
the stony shore of Lough Nasool,
the lake that every hundred years
mysteriously disappears.

Between the hillocks you will find,
too grand to be interned by words,
another world to seize your mind,
teeming with copious fearless birds:
swallows swoop down before your eyes
and larks shoot up into the skies.

Hoof prints of generations show
this is a place of Life; a lot
of those who visit do not know
that there are times when it is not,
when you can see the lake’s demise
in a deserted paradise.

Here Balor of the Evil Eye
was slain, the God of Death; this ground
absorbed the poison of his eye
that dries out everything around
centurially, so we’d recall
that Death is living after all.

But in the Year of the Quiet Sun,
three score ten years before its time,
in one large cloud the lake was gone
and sought a Continental clime
to christen a poet across the sea
and call him to his destiny.