Hello, welcome to the Blind by Podcast. If this is your first podcast, go back to the

very start, go back to the first episode, and start from there. A rusty plow, three heads

hanging between wide-appired legs, October playing a symphony and a slack wire pailing. Maguire watches

the drills flattened out, and the flints that lit a candle for him on a June altar, flameless.

The drills slipped by and the day slipped by, and he trembled his head away and ran free from the

world's harder, and taught himself wiser than any man in the townland when he laughed over

a pint of parter. Never where he's wanted, Maguire grunts and spits, through a clay wattle

the moustache and stares about him from the height, his dream changes like the cloud swung wind,

and he is not so sure now if his mother was right. When she praised the man who made a field his

bread, watch him, watch him, that man on a hill whose spirit is a wet sack, flapping about the knees

of time. He lives that his little fields may stay fertile when his own body is spread in the

bottom of a ditch under two coltors crossed in Christ's name. He was suspicious in his youth as a

rat near strange bread. When girls laughed, when they screamed, he knew that meant the cry of

fillies in season. He could not walk, the easy road to destiny, he dreamt, the innocence of young

brambles to hooked treachery or the grip, the grip of a regular fields, no man escapes. It could not

be that back of the hills love was free. That was an excerpt from a poem written by

Paddy Kavanaugh or Patrick Kavanaugh, the Irish poet, and it's an excerpt from a poem called

The Great Hunger, which is a beautiful poem, it's a boast. It's kind of a critique, a critique of

rural life in the 1940s in Ireland. The great hunger obviously is a name for

the Irish famine, that's what we call the Irish famine, but it's not about the famine.

It's about a spiritual hunger, an emotional hunger. It's about a hunger from meaning

in a community where the best that can be hoped for is to own a bit of land and grow a few spots.

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