A songbook was handed down to me upon the celebration of my birth by the British consul who happened to be Roman Catholic. I think at one time I might have known his name. He became a family legend with that moniker, The British Consul, as if there were no others. The songs were a collection of Irish favorites from long ago. Every St. Patrick's Day after I learned to play the piano, I would sit at whatever piano was available in our travels and sing the entire book. My mother particularly liked, "I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen." I wondered if she missed Ireland, the post my dad was assigned to for six years, where my older brother was born and she had what would turn out to be her favorite friend, Cassie Main. In 1986, with no piano at hand, I taped singing to a Casio keyboard and sent it to Arizona where my folks had settled, such a distance from the mists of the mountains of Mourne. Since I cannot sing for you here, I will post a couple of poems. Perhaps you can hum to yourselves some Irish ditty as you read.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
A Tour of the West Country
My father pedals every day
along the roads of Connemara.
He recites Yeats as he goes
and adjusts the muffler
my mother wove to protect him from the damp.
My father is blind which makes his
other senses keen, I understand.
I sit in a chair close by him
as he describes what he finds on his ride:
he talks fondly of the abbey ruins
and the sparse farm left to the Widow Ray;
he laughs heartily when remembering
his wild friend Seann Tom Finn.
Imagination unleashed, my father
pushes his Schwinn to its
most arduous setting.
"It's getting late! Fog's setting in!"
Three times a day he leaves his bed
to "have a go at" his exercise bike.
I tell him to say hello for me
to all along his tour
and wouldn't he like to go somewhere
else today, China?
Sweden? The Yucatan?
No. No. He says he's sure there is no place
like the West Country,
the fair, the enduring, the beauteous.
the emerald West Country,
a place he's never actually been to but that makes no difference to him.
Ceid mile failte, Dad, the tea will be
waiting for you, mind,
when you get back.
~~~~~~~
Shamrock, Texas
My mother's roots are near here--
in Norman, in Oklahoma City,
in this dry, dusty land that stretches
wide and white under the winter sky.
"The Indian Territory" she likes to call it
which conjures up terrors she may never have exorcised.
I prefer to think of her happier times when,
with walnuts in her apron pocket,
she walked steadfastly behind her sister's lead to school.
Or of the time she woke up to find snow
was their snug blanket, let in by a chink
in the cabin wall.
Some places change so unheedingly
that nothing is left to be recognized.
All is gone.
But here, the land stays the same;
its expansive beauty, its dogged endurance
keeps on.
The little girl of those long ago years
walks cheerfully by
walnuts jostling,careening, well-polished.
~~~~~~~~~~~
...may shamrocks from the land where snakes disappeared
and weathered crones changed into wondrous winged mermaids
bring you blessings...
