from green and blue things

Walked out from the city centre back home, along the Union Canal, earlier this evening ...

... Polwarth Parish Church was looking very majestic in the gloom - and the extra shows a slightly earlier shot from the main canal-basin, as it caught the last light of the day.

And thus here is one of Patrick Kavanagh's best known poems:


Canal Bank Walk

Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal
Pouring redemption for me, that I do
The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal,
Grow with nature again as before I grew.
The bright stick trapped, the breeze adding a third
Party to the couple kissing on an old seat,
And a bird gathering materials for the nest for the Word
Eloquently new and abandoned to its delirious beat.
O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web
Of fabulous grass and eternal voices by a beech,
Feed the gaping need of my senses, give me ad lib
To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech
For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven 
From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.

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Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967)

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