A Love Supreme

A poem

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

The whiskey priest
Grits his teeth at human fallibilities,
My frailty is just that I drink the stuff,
But with a holy glimmer of delight
No guilt, no sleight of conscience
Or of the hand, just the taste of heaven
But , sometimes, with water,
The more often I drink Fuisce Baile,
Moonshine,
plain and rough
The tougher I become.
Whiskey, or as we old-Irish say, Uisce Beatha,
Means the water of life in the Gaelic,
And in Druidical society
Before the curse of Christianity descended,
It was the holy water of life
And gave meaning to the barley and the corn
And the sun and the moon.
Like listening to Coltrane removes me from the gloom
Of modern living, enlivened by Uisce Beatha