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© Copyright 2009
J P McMenamin
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Below is the actual Dedication featured in the
book:
This book is dedicated
to the memory of Ireland’s forgotten rural poet, James Mc Cracken.
James Mc Cracken was born in 1871 in Co. Tyrone. This came as a
great surprise to his mother who as in Co. Antrim at the time. James Mc.
Cracken was illiterate. He never went to school – he couldn’t even tell you
where it was.
From an early age, young James Mc Cracken showed a great gift for
poetry. But not just any poetry. James Mc Cracken was fascinated by
manure. All the poems written by James Mc Cracken pay homage to the beauty
of – dung.
Who can forget the opening lines of his epic saga, A History Of Dung?
Manure beneath my finger nails
As I
carry milk in little pails
So simple – yet so
beautiful. Many people were puzzled by James’ love of manure. Indeed
Ireland’s great literary genius, W.B.Yeats once asked James “How can you
find beauty in shit?” Young James looked up at the great man with his pale,
sensitive, poetic, dung-smeared face and said “It may just be shit to you,
Mr. Yeats, - but it’s bread and butter to me.”
Sadly James Mc Cracken died in a mental institution, throwing himself
against the walls as he tried in vain to find a word that would rhyme with
excrement.
Thousands followed the coffin of James Mc Cracken to his final resting
place on a crisp October morning. A solitary piper played a plaintive
lament as James Mc Cracken was buried in a heap of well rotted manure.
And every time I see a steaming pile of dung on a frosty morning I
think once again of James Mc Cracken.
A simple man
A sensitive man.
A poet.
A poet with dung in his veins.
RIP. |