DAY 16: Favorite Irish Poem

April 16, 2013 by Aine 1 Comment

This photo of The Famine Sculpture – Dublin is courtesy of TripAdvisor

Odds are I will have a new one before the month is out, but right now my favorite poem is “The Emigrant Irish” by Dublin-born Eavan Boland. The poem appears in An Origin Like Water, Collected Poems 1957-1987.

Like oil lamps, we put them out back —

of our houses, of our minds. We had lights
better than, newer than and then

a time came, this time and now
we need them. Their dread, makeshift example:

they would have thrived on our necessities.
What they survived we could not even live.
By their lights now it is time to
imagine how they stood there, what they stood with,
that their possessions may become our power:

Cardboard. Iron. Their hardships parceled in them.
Patience. Fortitude. Long-suffering
in the bruise-colored dusk of the New World.

And all the old songs. And nothing to lose.

Author: Aine

I live in Saint Paul, Minnesota. My heritage pretty much covers the map of Ireland: great-great-grandparents from Cork (Crowley, Foley, Regan), a great-great-grandmother from Clare (Quinn), a great-great-grandfather from Fermanagh (McMahon) and his wife's parents from Mayo (McAndrew), a great-grandmother from Connemara (Hannon) married to my great-grandfather from Laois (McCormack), great-grandparents from Sligo (Flannery), and a great-grandmother from Kildare (Hill). All of those people ended up in Minnesota, where my four grandparents were born. Three and four generations after my people left Ireland for America, I retain all Irish heritage. So much for the melting pot...

One thought on “DAY 16: Favorite Irish Poem”

Mariann S. Regan (@MariannSRegan)
April 17, 2013 at 9:05 pm

That is a really evocative poem, and what a match for the sculpture. I have never seen a sculpture that thin — as if a solid mass could blow away. What pain and deprivation it reveals to us.