The Boys of Letterfrack

(“We cursed those cold black-robed men who swept 
the four winds and the four known seasons 
out heaven's door down on us below
They were beyond all sense, all reason …” — Paula Meehan, ‘The Boys from the Gloucester Diamond’.)


O the boys of Letterfrack they are never coming back
They are buried in the shadow of the mountain.
And although they’ve placed black stones:
Sad markers for young bones,
There are others who were damaged, beyond counting.

What were your great crimes? Children of the lost,
That you suffered as you slaved for church and state,
They tortured you, and buried you, and never paid the cost —
Their paltry recompense has come too late.

Chorus
In this place of beauty, that was never yours,
The mountain goat had heard your awful screams;
Your sentence was a death knell, your little lives were cursed;
And nightmare was the sum of all your dreams.

And who can ever know, in that church-ridden hell
The violence and the pain that you endured?
In all their great reports, their empty words, they tell:
Not one sincere — to truth they were inured!

Chorus 
Out here to Letterfrack, to slave for church and state
They sent you from the poverty of cities.
Cowered by punch and strap, solace came too late 
And mornings brought no ease, and no one’s pity.
In this place of beauty, that was never yours
The mountain goat had heard your awful screams;
Your sentence was a death knell, your little lives were cursed;
And nightmare was the sum of all your dreams

The boys of Letterfrack they are never coming back,
They are buried in the shadow of the mountain.

— Frank Callery.

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