Green beer sweating on lacquered bars,
plastic beads, paper hats, rented stars,
“Kiss me, I’m Irish” stretched across chests,
parades of bad accents and borrowed bests.
Lá Fhéile Pádraig!
Shots lined up like saints in a row,
toasts thrown loud where the fiddle flows,
everyone's Irish for one long night,
everyone's drunk on a filtered green light.
Cabbage boils in a *** of myth,
and corned beef’s cooked into counterfeit,
Cheap clovers stand in for prayers once said,
while history’s hushed so it won’t upset.
This day wasn’t born under neon signs,
it was forged in fields stripped bare by design.
In hunger that hollowed the ribs to dust,
in a language crushed quiet for speaking up.
A choice was carved clean, sharp as a blade:
die with your culture,
or live white unafraid.
So they lived.
They cut Gaeilge words from the backs of their throats,
shortened their names, learned acceptable notes,
when to laugh, when to bend, when to disappear,
how to survive by erasing the years.
They rocked the cradles of strangers' sons,
while their own slept in slums ten to one,
shacks below the towers they raised,
paid for in silence, hunger, and early graves.
America kept what passed white at a glance—
the song, the joke, the drink, the dance—
and buried the rest beneath soil and stone:
the famine, the bodies, the roads of bone.
Grass staining tongues, ships full of grief,
women and children swallowed by seas.
Lá Fhéile Pádraig,
raise your glass full of glee,
but know this day isn’t just revelry—
it’s a wake that forgot why it gathered at all,
a people cut down to a slurred drunken call.
The Irish are more than fairy tales told,
more than four leaf clovers and pots of gold.
Language buried yet still awake,
We are exile and fire, endurance and ache.
Mar 11
Mar 11, 2026 at 2:41 AM UTC
Green beer sweating on lacquered bars,
plastic beads, paper hats, rented stars,
“Kiss me, I’m Irish” stretched across chests,
parades of bad accents and borrowed bests.
Lá Fhéile Pádraig!
Shots lined up like saints in a row,
toasts thrown loud where the fiddle flows,
everyone's Irish for one long night,
everyone's drunk on a filtered green light.
Cabbage boils in a *** of myth,
and corned beef’s cooked into counterfeit,
Cheap clovers stand in for prayers once said,
while history’s hushed so it won’t upset.
This day wasn’t born under neon signs,
it was forged in fields stripped bare by design.
In hunger that hollowed the ribs to dust,
in a language crushed quiet for speaking up.
A choice was carved clean, sharp as a blade:
die with your culture,
or live white unafraid.
So they lived.
They cut Gaeilge words from the backs of their throats,
shortened their names, learned acceptable notes,
when to laugh, when to bend, when to disappear,
how to survive by erasing the years.
They rocked the cradles of strangers' sons,
while their own slept in slums ten to one,
shacks below the towers they raised,
paid for in silence, hunger, and early graves.
America kept what passed white at a glance—
the song, the joke, the drink, the dance—
and buried the rest beneath soil and stone:
the famine, the bodies, the roads of bone.
Grass staining tongues, ships full of grief,
women and children swallowed by seas.
Lá Fhéile Pádraig,
raise your glass full of glee,
but know this day isn’t just revelry—
it’s a wake that forgot why it gathered at all,
a people cut down to a slurred drunken call.
The Irish are more than fairy tales told,
more than four leaf clovers and pots of gold.
Language buried yet still awake,
We are exile and fire, endurance and ache.
Please excuse the title, it doesn't recognize the fada.
I only recently discovered how deeply my family history is tied to An Gorta Mór, the Great Famine. Learning what my ancestors endured—first in Ireland and then in America—lit something in me that I can’t ignore. It pushed me to start reclaiming a heritage that was slowly buried over generations.
This poem is one way I remember what was nearly forgotten.
