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| Leehaun/Leenane | Westport | Castlebar |
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| Ballina | Enniscrone | Easkey |
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| Sligo | Drumcliff | Ballyshannon |
Continued casually up the west side northward about 120 miles —
Westport ⇒ Castlebar ⇒ Ballina ⇒ EnnIscrone ⇒ Easkey ⇒ Sligo ⇒ Drumcliff ⇒ Ballyshannon...
At Easkey, I looked for
riders bouncing on the waves.
At Drumcliff, I stopped to say hello to William Butler Yeats in the Celtic graveyard. Much has changed in poetic styles since Yeats died in 1939. Yeats would not call it poetry — but rap, or is it hip-hop, is what is changing the language of the 21st century. That's what poetry does. It creates new words, new worlds. Yeats grew up with swans, we grew up with graffiti. Graffiti is a staccato visual — it's here, it's there, it's everywhere — discontinuous punctuations of city sounds bouncing off our city walls. Our outbursts parallel our scrawls; our communications: twit snips in the digital air. Bits of fits with zits for wits. Rap puts a rhythm to it. Rap on M&Mers.
Somewhere along the way, maybe this night, maybe a previous night, I discovered a little red school house close by the road. It was abandoned, or maybe school had not started yet, or there were no teachers or children anywhere left to teach. Did I sleep there? Do not remember. Across the road there was a plaque saying something about Yeats. Did he teach here? Did he go to school here? Poetry begins in quiet rooms in little houses.
