the youngest farmer

 

the lambs are in the fields

the youngest farmer rubs hands

chapped like dry leaves

in a life that never ends

you will not find his tale

in any tract of  erudition

but in the dull trochaic verses of the bible

is found the course of his living

he stands and does not hear

the echo from Mount Zion

resound through Cnoc An Oirthir

by the shores of old Kilcullen

and perhaps it's for the best

it would plaque him at his rest

strange days

 

It is a truth universally acknowledged that whenever I praise a commentator on the internet, he immediately goes flop bott and crackerdog.

I remember a few years ago telling everyone that the philosopher David Wood was one of the great thinkers of our era and perhaps the greatest Western scholar of Islam of all time.

Whereupon as if by magic, David Wood began eating Qurans live on air.

The axiom about my praise producing general nuttiness among the populace, was recalled to me again this week when the writer broadcaster Mark Steyn whom I have praised up to the hilt, declared that it was his view that the Iranians couldn't nuke Washington DC soon enough.

Sigh.

For the record Steyn is still right about many things particularly his critique of Covid 19  vaccines, and in his excoriation of the British pseudo establishment for it's unjust incarceration of Tommy Robinson and .

But I have to demur mildly from his nuke Washington schtick.

Ditto David Wood still being a genius, he still is, although I wouldn't endorse his choice of culinary delicacies.

In other news, I dropped into an Aunt's house this evening and encountered my feminist cousin Pauline sporting a nifty lapel pin.

"What are you advertising?" I enquired.

"Free Palestine," she answered.

It was the work of a moment to launch into a few bars of my perennial hit song, a cover of a Jackson Five number, to wit:

"Don't blame it on the moonlight,

Don't blame it on the Jihad,

Don't blame it on the Islam,

Lay it on the Israelis.

Moonlight.

Jihad.

Iranians.

Lay it on the Israelis.

Islam.

Jihad.

Mass murder,

Lay it on the Israelis,

Hoo yeah."

The cousin pursed her lips, looked into the middle distance and murmured: "That's enough of that."

You know bold readers it's scarcely a decade ago when there were pro Palestine demos in Dublin and I would walk up to them and roar: "No more Muslim Terror," or "No more Jihad," or on one memorable occasion when I challenged fifty proselytising Muslims in the city centre with the phrase, "No more murders of little Jewish schoolgirls in France," and an Arab Muslim had laughed gleefully and his friend a white Muslim had told me, "You are a joke," and I had declaimed: "You are a joke, and your Prophet is a joke, and you and your religion and your Prophet are a joke on humanity and on the world," and the Arab Muslim who had been giggling about the dead schoolgirls went toe to toe with me snarling: "You walk on or I tear you," and I had faced him down with the classic line: "Ah go kill another schoolgirl Muslim," and I kept saying it and he kept snarling about tearing me until he broke and his fellow Muslims led him sobbing away like nothing so much as an overwrought psychopathic Islamic James Brown becoming tired and emotional during a typically het up performance and being led off by his backing group, led him away I tells ee, because for some arcane reason they weren't willing to kill me that day which was why your man was crying with frustration, but when Pauline told me tonight: "That's enough of that," I shut the fudge up.