No Dancing Sun This Easter Morning
No dancing sun the Easter morning
As the birds sing in the sky
I sleepy look out at the dawn
As the clouds slowly roll by.
The black gives way to a grey and blue
Behind which the sun fails to show
That my grandfather said in the sky it dances
For Easter all of those years ago.
One hundred years ago now past
Men in Dublin sat confused
Who expected fighting to be
Wondered was their plot by the British rused
Angered Eoin O’ Neill sent out
The word no rising was there to be
From home to home the messengers went round
To tenament and cottage in the country.
But country folk action would see
Who to the city their way had made
A hopeless gesture to fire the blood
Of a nation cowed and afraid.
The nation rose in time as one
But for all the won compared to what they saught
It was as well, we bitter write today
If those men brave risen had not.
Neighbour against neighbour pitched
Freedom or the crown: which flag?
There was freedom of culture and faith here now
Of which any Irishman could brag.
The tenants woes were settled mostly
Bar the labourers on the farm
If the landlord was known the tenant to crush
He in turn gave the Spailpin the strong arm.
In time brother to brother would turn
The Free State whether or not to accept
Partition, a nightmare to all sides, imposed
Most of Ulster by England kept.
A hundred years is passed by now
Thir land is not their own
The Union Jack is the flag of Derry and Belfast
In a land still not their own.
The lockout and the Liverpool ships
Are now but a memory
Paragraph in a childs textbook
Who, bored, learns in school history.
Those who held the chains of power
They are still in command
The rich held onto their cash
Protestant landlords gone: isnt Ireland grand!
People to the roads again have took
As banks take the rooves over their head
The farms from beneath their feet
Farmers distraught, by their own hand dead.
The Proclamation was only words
For which all that blood was shed
All we changed was the flag on the stick
As James Connolly prophetically said.
On a Longford hillside my grandfather stood
My father told me when I was a boy
On an Easter morning as tradition it was
To see the sun in the sky dance with joy.
Only seen by those whose faith was true
He claimed it to have seen
Few of his kind alive today
That on those fields had been.