Out Of Dartmoor Prison
21st Century
(St. Valentines Day, Feb. 14, 1922,
two months after the establishment of The Irish Free State)
Who would put a shackle
On the human mind
Is blind.
Poets look
And poets find.
A poem is rooted in the soil
And all its imagery is toil
Of skin and hair,
Of sunlight
And the night air.
In the telling
Of his Dartmoor day
My father grew
Beyond decay.
And every generation's claim
Is gathered from another's aim,
Stretching the promise
In all we tell
Cell upon living cell.
Into a prison
I was born,
Fettered to
A wall of scorn.
Who can tell me,
Tell me why
Child or man
Should ever cry
To be born
Of Earth and sky?
From Dartmoor Prison
Two men came
Free at last,
One from death
And one from shame.
The greatest gift
My father gave,
Reaches now
Beyond the grave
To see far past
A mystic's dream
The shape of our
Eternal scheme.
DayPoems Poem No. 2443
<a href="http://www.daypoems.net/poems/2443.html">Out Of Dartmoor Prison by William Brendan McPhillips</a>
The DayPoems Poetry Collection, www.daypoems.net
Timothy Bovee, editor
Poets Poems