Gabriel Fitzmaurice: Two Poems

On My Sixty-Second Birthday

To think I’m sixty-two and still alive!

The music didn’t kill me, nor the booze,

The dangers and the depths that I survived

In thrall to a dark and lonely muse.

To think I’m sixty-two and still alive

While others I have loved are now no more,

I’m still around to sing and play and jive

As the shades of night-time gather at my door.

Tonight I’ll go to Máiréad’s for a song

With The Boghole Boys, our band from long ago,

We’ll sing and dance and drink the whole night long

Joyful now where once my heart was low.

We’ll sing again, this Christmas, to the light

In after hours that have no fear of night.

Gabriel Fitzmaurice

Reading William Wordsworth

“Oh joy! that in our embers …” Come off it, head.

Just because you’re past it doesn’t mean

The rest of us must join the living dead;

I’m sixty-plus and still am full of beans.

“Oh joy! that in our embers …” Get a life!

Like one whose heart is fresh and full of dreams,

Delighting in my children, grandkids, wife,

I’m happier now than I have ever been.

Examined, life’s worth living. How much time

I’ve left here doesn’t bother me at all.

My course complete, resolved at last in rhyme,

I sing, oh joy!, being still on fire, enthralled.

So raise your glass and join me in my song.

Drink to life! Stop moping! And move on!

Gabriel Fitzmaurice