Description Skibbereen
Nicholas Cummins, with five men all loaded with bread,
Came on the starving, their eyes fixed and staring ahead
And in their dark hovels, no skerrick of food to be seen:
Wan walking skeletons dying in Skibbereen.
Six famished wraiths were huddled amongst the piled straw
And as he approached, they clawed at him across the floor:
Four children, a woman, a dead man lying slumped in between ?
They would never survive to see spring come to Skibbereen.
Cummins turned round, and stepping without he espied
Two hundred such phantoms surrounding him on every side,
Howling like demons as hunger devoured from within
And death spoke through each foetid cavernous grin.
He trod among corpses, some half-devoured by rats,
And reaching behind him, a woman tugged at his cravat;
Her newborn she held out in fingers that showed every bone
And he wept with rage at the sins he could never atone.
?Hail to you Wellington, this is our own Waterloo:
We meekly stand by and pretend there is nothing to do.
We claim this is Providence; nothing could be more obscene,
For God turned a Devil the day He condemned Skibbereen.?
Lyric by Giles Watson, to the tune of ?Dunlavin Green?.
