Tell me, laid-back Mary, just what the set-up is,

I need you to be telling me my part in all of this!

All depends, drawls Mary, you can never guarantee,

Things sort of happen, just sit back and see.

Laconic laid-back Mary is driving me to Liffey,

A strange bugger from England, sinuses all sniffy.

We hurl the van at Liffey through a streaky-bacon sky,

At jet-black mountains, Mary Szmekura and I,

Till an old weatherboard schoolhouse somehow just appears,

Old Laid-back slamming down through all the growly gears,

And it's open door and a beeline to a cracking log fire

Where someone with a fiddle is bowing higher, higher.

A bit of a squeaky squeezebox, a brace of lithe guitars

Are doling out a strathspey beneath huge Liffey stars;

Then old Mike finds another tune, so it's chocks away

Swerving off to Ireland, hot-foot to Galway Bay.

The playing ends in smiles, shoulders slump and sigh,

Waiting for someone else to start, when suddenly this guy

Quoits his voice into the middle, a Geordie miners’ song

Of men weighed down by rockface and bosses who were wrong.

Then someone says a poem! and it seems a simple thing

To add my voice to the company as much as those that sing

To an intensity of listening as belonged to long ago

When Pa read out of Scripture, was reverenced doing so.

A fiddle starts a-twiddling, accordians gust in,

A tin whistle's toot-fluting over them, they begin

A jaunty reel that rattles around the walls,

Feet are thumping floorboards; next someone drawls

A gutsy song of billabongs, then I add more poems.

One final jig then maybe? before we head for homes.

But there's a whisper, Kelly! who's shut his eyes to play

And is like to start an old lament to snatch the breath away

With a thing that is as soulful as when God himself is sad.

Instinct knew its moment and instinct Kelly had

For the old ache of love and loss and ancient desperate times

Alive and deep in everyone. For him these rhymes.