THE WHISPERING ROOTS Roots are for holding on, and holding dear. Mine, like a child's milk teeth, came gently away >From Ireland at the close of my second year, Is it second childhood now -- that I overhear Them whisper across a lifetime as if from yesterday? We have had blood enough and talk of blood, These sixty years. Exiles are two a penny And race a rancid word; a meaningless word For the Anglo-Irish; a flighty cuckoo brood Foisted on alien nests, they knew much pride and many Falls. But still my roots go whispering on Like rain on a soft day. Whatever lies Beneath their cadence I could not disown; An Irish stranger's voice, its tang and tone, Recalls a family language I thrill to recognize. All the melodious places only seen On a schoolboy's map -- Kinsale, Meath, Connemara; Writers -- Swift, Berkeley, Goldsmith, Sheridan: Fighters, from Vinegar Hill to Stephen's Green: The Sidhe, saints, scholars, rakes of Mallow, kings of Tara -- Were background music to my ignorant youth. Now on a rising wind louder it swells >From the lonely hills of Laois. What can a birth - Place mean, its features comely or uncouth, To a long-rootless man? Yet still the place compels. We Anglo-Irish and the memory of us Are thinning out. Bad landlords some, some good, But never of a land rightfully ours, We hunted, fished, swore by our ancesors, Till we were ripped like parasite growth from native wood. And still the land compels me; not ancestral Ghosts, nor regret for childhood's fabled charms, But a rare peacefulness, consoling, festal, As if the old religion we oppressed all Those years folded the stray within a father's arms. The modern age has passed this island by And it's the peace of death her revenants find? Harsh Dublin wit, peasant vivacity Are here to give your shallow claims the lie. Perhaps in such soil only the heart's long roots will bind -- Even, transplanted, quiveringly respond To their first parent earth. Here God is taken For granted, time like a well-tutored hound Brought to man's heel, and ghosting underground Something flows to the exile from what has been foresaken. In age, body swept on, mind crawls upstream Toward the source; not thinking to find there Visions or fairy gold -- what old men dream Is pure restatement of the original theme, A sense of rootedness, a source held near and dear. -- Anglo-Irish C. Day-Lewis, Poet Laureate, England