THE GENERATIONS Now, in the evenings, when the light Goes suddenly, and the houses are Hushed in a dusk of uneasy birds, We within doors draw close to the breathing fire, Circle of lamplight, voices, outside the night Of darkened air threatening a storm, A night of possible loss. Warmed by words We sometimes forget the life we end Here by the water, near the windy quays, Life stretched from minute to staring minute, Dragging its heels along the cobbled streets, Watching, waiting, listening to the seas Rising, but for the moment only comforted For dawn brings the birds of stone, The stifled cry lost when the shutter bangs And the black wind ruffles the Northern cock, Dawn brings the empty bay, the stranded boats, And white as ghost-light the lighthouse on the rock Derelict, where our women go each morning, Where Time is the water washing each day ashore, The faded message in a drifting bottle. And we rise with the light to our partial death, To a day of habit, to a sky That answers no-one. And sometimes We pray. But always Time brings in the sea To eat our fields, beat down the makeshift walls, And take from us again our living sons. -- George M. BRADY, "1000 Years of Irish Poetry," ed. Kathleen Hoagland (1947).