Who Will Wear the Poet’s Crown for Ireland?

Yeats can be seen walking

Sligo’s green pastures.

On the Derry soggy peat bogs

sits the ghost of Heaney.

Mahon is riding free over

the beauty of the Ulster landscape,

while Wilde is wandering Dublin

in his best fedora hat and cape.

MacNiece is climbing fjords again

with his old friend Auden.

Eavan Boland is knitting words

onto bohemian stationery paper

MacDonagh would be still patrolling

the Jacob's biscuit factory,

as Mangan is sitting with MacGowan

sharing a bottle of Uisce Beatha poitin.

What literary writer can now rise like a giant?

Who will be led by Cú Chulainn’s hand?

Who will wear the Poet’s Crown

for modern day Ireland?

Uisce Beatha poitin = water of life in Gaelic