The Yellow Bittern
Source: The Stone Fiddle by Paddy Tunney
Location: New Edition, page 183 / 184
‘Twas break of day but no bittern’s horn
Filled the waking morn with its hollow boom.
For I found him prone on a bare flag blown,
By the loughshore lone where he met his doom.
His legs were sunk in the slime and slunk,
A hostage held in the fangs of frost.
O men of knowledge lament his going,
For want of liquor his life was lost.
O yellow bird, ‘tis my bitter grief
I’d as lee or lief that my race was run.
No hunger’s tooth but a parching drouth
That has sapped your mouth after all your fun.
Far worse to me than the Sack of Troy
That my darling boy with the frost was slain.
No want or woe did his wings bestow,
As he drank the flow of a brown bog drain.
Degrading vile was the way you died,
My bittern beauteous of glowing sheen.
‘Twas at dawn each day that your pipe you’d play,
As content you law on a hillock green
O my great fatigue and my sorrow sore,
That your tail is higher than heart or head.
And the tipplers say as they pass this way,
“Had he drunk his fill he would not be dead.”
O bittern bright ‘tis my thousand woes
That the rooks and crows are all pleasure bound,
With the rats and mice as they cross the ice
To indulge in vice at your funeral mound.
Had word reached me of your woeful plight,
On the ice I’d smite and the water free.
You’d have all that lake for the thirst to slake
And we’d hold not wake for the Bunnán Buí.
‘Tis not the blackbird that I’m bewailing,
Or thrush assailing the blossomed braes.
But my bittern yellow, that hearty fellow,
Who has got my hue and my wilful ways.
By the loughshore bank he forever drank
And his sorrow sank in the rolling wave.
Come sun or rain, every drop I’ll drain,
For the cellar’s empty beyond the grave.