It has rained for 109 consecutive days Crossmolina, County Mayo. Crossmolina, Crossmolina, you are drowning where you lie The waters rise before you, they fall down from the sky; Bearing waves and roaring seas, and bringing weary thoughts to me Of a sunny dune in Mali, where I would that I could be.
One hundred days of endless rain, one hundred days plus nine Of unceasing, heartless downpour, a punishment divine Where the brown boglands echo with the people's plaintive pleas, Against fresh storms a-blowing from north Atlantic seas.
The people pray in earnest but they also pray in vain, For their one sure certain portion is another fall of rain. They plead, they beg they whimper, prostrate on the sodden sod, Yet once again are smitten by the rainly wrath of God
For rain in all its guises, rain in its many forms, Gathers alongside Mayo, in clouds and gales and storms Gathers there at day break, gathers round the clock, To cover all Claremorris, and moist pilgrims bowed at Knock.
While wide Lough Conn has risen up, well above Slieve Carr, A single spire above the waves marks the town of Castlebar, And priests that prayed for instant drought alongside Achill Sound, Were caught by an instant flood there, and instantly were drowned. Then the downpour began to ease, eased to a steady shower And in Killala's cathedral vaults, they hailed the bishop's power. The shower fell to a trickle which wouldn't fill a brickie's hod, And the trickle then turned to, another soft day, thank God.
The bishop rose up smiling, saying this was a sign from above, For the Lord he giveth freely in return for our given love The prelate bestowed his blessing upon a grateful nave And vanished still brightly smiling, on the crest of a tidal-wave.
A tithe of Mayo's showers, a hint of the lashes that fall, Exceed the rainfall in Mali since the end of the Berlin wall. And maybe that's the lesson, one that we find most emphatic, To search the common-ground, twixt the bone-dry and aquatic. If Mali's dunes and Mayo's bogs could in common cause unite, Might not date-palms flourish the length of Killalla Bight? Might not the virgin visit her shrine outside Timbuctoo. While touregs follow the camel trail, from Conn to farflung Clew?
If Mayo spread one day of its rain on Mali for a year, The two could feed all Africa, from Good Hope to Agadir. And if Senegal and Donegal agreed a common plan, They could produce a common food, most agreeable to man.
If Bord na Mona churned the peat the length of the desert land While bedouin screeched for trade along the Mulrany Strand We might all be safe home again before the rains resume, Before ancient truths return, and even older truths exhume.
For it's a strangely human yearning, by kith or kin or breed, To guard one's mother's offspring, to mind one's father's seed. Though Mayo man detests the rain, the Mali man the sun, The trick is teaching each man, respect for the other one. Crossmolina, Crossmolina, you are where this all began, Beside Burkina Faso, not far from Ardrehan, Let's mix and match sand with peat, Capri with County Carlow, And Cross is now in a place called Mayi, and Timbuctoo in Malo