The Streets of Dublin

I don't want to stand

On the stage with a sword

I went to a pantomime once

I was bored

I'm not a poetical sort of a person like you

When I need a poem

The streets and the gutters will do

There's Tommy Flanagan who lights the gas lamps-

A hundred ninety lamps in Phoenix park alone

He's done it drunk for over fifty-seven years

In Dublin!

And down on Henry Street is Mad John Maher-

Old rambling Johnny with a face like hammered meat!

But Johnny's singing brings a Dublin man to tears

I don't know

The words to tell you how it feels

Or how to put it in a rhyme

But if you come with me you'll know...

How the lamps in the park

Look like god in the dark

As they glow

On the streets of Dublin

The dealers hawking and the dockers yelling

The buskers banging and the ragmen ringing bells

And there's Maureen whose door is always open for

All Dublin!

And Tony Kiely with his racing pigeons

It's like religion how he lives to fly those birds-

He swears they travel for a hundred miles or more

I don't know

The kind of words that you might say

But I can put it my own way

And if you come with me you'll know

That those birds on their wing

Are a beautiful thing

As they blow

Through the streets of Dublin

And there's music like nothin' you've heard

If you know the right jukebox to play!

There are glasses to raise in the praise

Of surviving the day...

Down where

Miss Kitty Farrelly is pouring whiskey

And Frankie Donahue is lighting her cigar

A smokey den where working men don't bring the wife...

It's the laughter of fellas with stories to tell

Men who love to get drunk and raise true feckin' hell!

Ah, you come out with me and you'll see what you're missing in life

On the Streets of Dublin

On the Streets of Dublin

On the Streets of Dublin

On the Streets of Dublin

On the Streets of Dublin

On the Streets of Dublin

On the Streets of Dublin

On the Streets of Dublin