I Left Familiar Places Poem by Francis Duggan

The countryside I was raised in was distant from the sea
And I was happy to live there till the wander bug hit me
And I yearned to see the bigger World beyond my Homeland shore
Far distant from Duhallow and the roadway to Rathmore.

Far distant from Mushera and Caherbarnagh and from old Clara hill
And far distant from the dipper's home in the babbling upland rill
The lure of foreign places kept luring me away
And in Millstreet in Duhallow I would not grow old and gray.

I left familiar places and I left kith and kin
To make a fresh start elsewhere and a new life to begin
Yet now I'm not any wiser and my finances did not grow
And for my travels one might say I don't have much to show.

Above the rushy meadow where I walked as a boy
The little plain brown skylark is carolling as he fly
I listened to his ancestor a small speck in the sky
When I was young and innocent in Millstreet in July.

My early memories of Nature to this day with me remain
The little wriggly tadpole who was born in the drain
Had lost his tail and had grown legs and was now a tiny frog
As he hopped through the green rushes in the meadow by the bog.

In the wild garden of Nature each day a new surprise
The mother wren had many children for one of tiny size
Often heard her partner singing he carolled loud and long
And for such a little fellow he had a big bird song

In Nature's green wild kingdom the wild birds chirp and sing
And the tiny red ladybird with dark spots on her wings
In the rank grass by the hedgerow is chasing insect prey
From Nature the young person learns something every day.

Our happy memories from our Childhood years with us seem to remain
And I'd trade my life experiences for to be young again
The song of the wild chaffinch was to me a thing of joy
But that was many years ago and I was then a boy.

I left familiar places and my friends and family
Because the bug of wander had somehow bitten me
I dreamt of fame and fortune but neither came my way
And I'm no better off financially than I had been today.