Jane Dougherty’s 3rd poetry challenge based on a quote from WB Yeats is as follows: “With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,”—W.B. Yeats. Follow Jane and her inspiring poetry at her blog, link below, where you can also see a photograph from Paul Militaru which influenced today’s poem: https://janedougherty.wordpress.com
My poem today is entitled SALMON DANCERS
And so swim the salmon, against
the rising stream, foam flushing
against fins as falcons fly overhead
in the fight for freedom, destiny
is not a dance that can long
be distracted, shiny specks of silver
dancing, darting, borne to beat back,
to wage against the rushing waters
as they make their way west. And so
swim the salmon, along the corroded
current of Connacht, that Atlantic
sojourn, that shore still swaying
in the shadow of those ancient songs
when souls set off in search of security
overseas, burdened boats battened
down with the beaten and the broken,
culled like cattle in the rain, boats
with bodhrans and fiddlers, singing
and dying through their dreams
of a new world, already mourning
the old lands, the homelands
they’d been swept from, kept from.
And so swim the salmon
as the storms rage, as they battle
onwards, salmon dancers, skating
on the waters, leaving trickles like stones
once tossed by hands now lost, tracks
to follow for others who’ll follow,
as others have followed, as others
who’ve fallen, their faces now faded.
And so swim the shining salmon,
off into the world with the sound
of home in every stroke.
All words by Damien B. Donnelly
Picture from the internet of the Salmon of Knowledge.
Damien B. Donnelly 