The Great Potato Famine
The Irish people are no strangers to famine, misery, oppression and exploitation. That is why I fished around to find something germane to the latest developments in Ireland.
I came upon an Irish woman who penned her patriotic poetry under the nome de plume, Speranza. Her real name was Jane Francesca Elgee.
Born in Wexford about the year 1826, Miss Elgee belonged to a strictly Protestant, and Conservative family who had no sympathy with national aspirations.
“Until my eighteenth year,” she stated, “I never wrote anything. Then one day a volume of ‘Ireland’s Library,’ issued from ‘The Nation’ office by Mr. Duffy, happened to come my way. I read it eagerly, and my patriotism was enkindled. Until then,” she continued, “I was quite indifferent to the national movement, and if I thought about it at all, I probably had a very bad opinion of the leaders. For my family was Protestant and Conservative, and there was no social intercourse between them and the Catholics and Nationalists. But once I had caught the national spirit the literature of Irish songs and sufferings had an enthralling interest for me. Then it was that I discovered that I could write poetry. In sending my verses to the editor of ‘The Nation’ I dared not have my name published, so I signed them ‘Speranza’, and my letters ‘John Fanshawe Ellis,’ instead of ‘Jane Francesca Elgee.
Her works were well known in her day, and I have taken the liberty to revise this one…
HAVE YE DONE WELL FOR IRELAND?
Speranza
(Revision by WilliamBanzai7)
O COUNTRY, writhing in thy chains of debt
With fierce, wild efforts to be free,
Not seeing that with every strain
The Ponzi globalists close firmer over thee;
Or grasping blindly in thy hate
The temple pillars of the bailed out State,
To hurl them down on friend and foe,
Crushed in one common currency overthrow—
Can none of all thy Poet band
Preach nobler aims, loved Ireland?
As David drove with magic chords
The Evil Spirit back to night;
As Moses by his mighty words
Led Egypt’s bondmen up to light;
Hast thou no Poet, strong to calm
Thy troubled soul with holy psalm?
Or trusted Chief, to be relied upon,
Across the derivative Rubicon,
Could lead thee with pure heart and hand
To financial Freedom—my own Ireland?
By those doomed men, in austerity’s despair
Slowly wasting in a bailout dungeon’s gloom;
By all youth’s fiery heart can dare
Quenched in the debt prison’s living tomb—
By the corroding financier’s chain,
That tortures with Promethean pain
Of distressed debt vultures gnawing at the core
Of their lost lives for evermore—
I ask you, People of our Land,
Have ye done well for Ireland?
By History traced on trading dungeon walls,
By scaffolds, chains, and exiles’ tears,
Slow marking, as the shadow falls,
The amortization of the years;
By youthful genius crushed and progress barred,
By noble aspirations marred,
Till with a smouldering fire’s life
They burn in deadly hate and strife—
I ask you, Rulers of our Land,
Have ye done well for Ireland?
O Men! these men are brothers too,
Tho’ frenzied by that fatal Ponzi dream,
Their living souls were meant to do
Some noble work in God’s great scheme,
Perchance to hew down, branch and root,
The banksta tree that bore such bitter fruit;
But, left unguided in global finance’s myopic sight,
They grope out blindly in the night
Of their insolvent passions; striking down
Their Country’s proud hopes with their own.
But now, ye say, the Land hath rest—
Aye, with the debt weights on her eyes;
And foreclosure arms across her breast,
And Eurocratic hands stifling down her cries.
So rests another banksta vic within the grave
O’er which the Wall Street grasses wave.
Oh, better far some kindly word
To stay the vengeance?lifted sword,
Or Love, with queenly, outstretched hand,
To soothe thee—fated Ireland!
WB7: I am sick and tired of bankstas and their political whores fucking everything up everywhere they go and I am sure Speranza would have been happy sayin’ as much on a blog the likes of Zero Hedge.
