#irishhistory
An open Rosary,
Sprawled on the table
Has the shape of Eire.
Towns joined like beads
On winding, rope roads.
At the end of the main street
In Shercock, Lough Egish,
Or a thousand other towns,
Looms the church spire,
God's rod.
The square still bustles on Wednesdays.
The smithy's forge
Now lights up a Paddy Power;
The Euro Store sells needles and thread
Where once a seamstress sat;
Shish Kabobs on flat bread sell
Where the butcher's counter displayed the day's cut.
But scrape away the paint
And attend to the devotion and mystery
Of small town Erin;
Where only the pubs maintain names
Decade after decade.
There, on the wall, see the rebels
Enjoying a football match,
And the crowd, laughing,
Has their backs.
Nov 9, 2017
Nov 9, 2017 at 11:33 AM UTC
I was born
With white privilege;
Irish ethnicity at that.
Remember their holocausts!
Occupied, evicted, brutalized, lynched, starved, hedge-scbooled, and,
Refugeed on their own land,
And on and on, and so on
For seven hundred years.
These things were before my time,
But not my Granda's.
It's so very true, I was born with white privilege,
But not with white entitlement.
Jun 5, 2020
Jun 5, 2020 at 3:15 PM UTC
"I know an agent, who knows your man, who has a machine to do the job in no time."
… I'll book a flight then
This time,
I’ll sail on a freighter cabin,
Back,
Have a B&B waiting
In a familiar town,
In County Cavan.
I’ll visit with my Uncle,
Drink pot-boiled water
From tea-ringed mugs.
I’ll pour out questions,
Wear an extra layer
To stay the chill,
With my muddy wellies
On his cement floor,
In his soot-walled room,
Behind the sky-blue, wood rot door;
With the road encroaching,
As never before.
A light dangles from the end of a cord,
The tap is just outside the door,
A four burner propane stove
Provides heat to boil and cook.
The Immaculate Heart
Is missing from where it once was,
In the nook, on the wall.
The thistle encrusted lane
Leads up a hill, from behind,
To a natural well,
Where animals watered and grazed.
Beyond, hedgerows of bramble,
With walls of stone,
Delineate the fields;
Seven in all, they called their own.
But seven can’t stay home.
The youngest,
The unchosen one,
Lives there now on his own.
There' s no cold ash
In the open hearth,
Where generations
Died and birthed.
Despite the depth of the walls,
The rusted roof and lifeless stalls,
The whitewash too
Will bleed to earth,
Onto the tumulus of dirt.
... then, I will book a flight
Jan 9, 2020
Jan 9, 2020 at 10:22 AM UTC