At Swim-two-birds by Flann O’Brien Page A

dark sloe-tree;
O watercress, O green-crowned,
at the well-brink.
    O holly, holly-shelter,
O door against the wind,
O ash-tree inimical,
your spearshaft of warrior.
    O birch clean and blessed,
O melodious, O proud,
delightful the tangle
of your head-rods.
    What I like least in woodlands
from none I conceal it –
stirk of a leafy-oak,
at its swaying.
    O faun, little long-legs,
I caught you with grips,
I rode you upon your back
from peak to peak.
    Glen Bolcain my home ever,
it was my haven,
many a night have I tried
a race against the peak.
    I beg your pardon for interrupting, said Shanahan, but you’re after reminding me of something, brought the thing into my head in a rush.
    He swallowed a draught of vesper-milk, restoring the cloudy glass swiftly to his knee and collecting little belated flavourings from the corners of his mouth.
    That thing you were saying reminds me of something bloody good. I beg your pardon for interrupting, Mr Storybook.
    In the yesterday, said Finn, the man who mixed his utterance with the honeywords of Finn was the.first day put naked into the tree of Coill Boirche with nothing to his bare hand but a stick of hazel. On the morning of the second day thereafter…
    Now listen for a minute till I tell you something, said Shanahan, did any man here ever hear of the poet Casey?
    Who did you say? said Furriskey.
    Casey. Jem Casey.
    On the morning of the second day thereafter, he was taken and bound and rammed as regards his head into a black hole so that his white body was upside down and upright in Erin for the gazing thereon of man and beast
    Now give us a chance, Mister Storybook, yourself and your black hole, said Shanahan fingering his tie-knot with a long memory-frown across his brow. Come here for a minute. Come here till I tell you about Casey. Do you mean to tell me you never heard of the poet Casey, Mr Furriskey?
    Never heard of him, said Furriskey in a solicitous manner.
    I can’t say, said Lamont, that I ever heard of him either.
    He was a poet of the people, said Shanahan.
    I see, said Furriskey.
    Now do you understand, said Shanahan. A plain upstanding labouring man, Mr Furriskey, the same as you or me. A black hat or a bloody ribbon, no by God, not on Jem Casey. A hard-working well-made block of a working man, Mr Lamont, with the handle of a pick in his hand like the rest of us. Now say there was a crowd of men with a ganger all working there laying a length of gas-pipe on the road. All right The men pull off their coats and start shovelling and working there for further orders. Here at one end of the hole you have your men crowded up together in a lump and them working away and smoking their butts and talking about the horses and one thing and another. Now do you understand what I’m telling you. Do you follow me?
    I see that.
    But take a look at the other end of the hole and here is my brave Casey digging away there on his own. Do you understand what I mean, Mr Furriskey?
    Oh I see it all right, said Furriskey.
    Right. None of your horses or your bloody blather for him. Not a bit of it. Here is my nabs saying nothing to nobody but working away at a pome in his head with a pick in his hand and the sweat pouring down off his face from die force of his work and his bloody exertions. That’s a quare one!
    Do you mind that now, said Lamont.
    It’s a quare one and one that takes a lot of beating. Not a word to nobody, not a look to left or right but the brain-box going there all the time. Just Jem Casey, a poor ignorant labouring man but head and shoulders above the whole bloody lot of them, not a man in the Whole country to beat him when it comes to getting together a bloody pome – not a poet in the whole world that could hold a candle to Jem Casey, not a man of them fit to stand beside him. By God I’d back him to win by a canter against the whole bloody lot of them, give him his due.
    Is that a fact, Mr Shanahan, said Lamont. It’s not every day in the