Irish – Artists Without Walls

CROSSING IRELAND" "HUDSON VALLEY SUNRISE" by ANGELA ALAIMO O'DONNELL

The last poem in Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s series. Click “Crossing Ireland” for the opening essay. More about Angela Alaimo O’Donnell.

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Happy St. Patrick’s Day

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HUDSON VALLEY SUNRISE

The sun a brilliant girl this morning,

puts me in mind of MacGillycuddy rising,

the mountain behind our B&B

who whispered mist all day to me

while I fell in love with Cill Airne.

I was a sly watcher, not letting her know

what it meant to live in her shadow,

I, a girl long in love with the sun,

saw my self in her dark disposition.

I gave up light, not counting the cost.

I felt found and I felt lost,

living her murk and uncertainty

instead of the native clarity

my southern soul had long demanded,

hearing, for once, what my heart commanded.

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CROSSING IRELAND: "ON LEAVING ÉIRE" by ANGELA ALAIMO O'DONNELL

The eleventh of twelve poems in Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s series. Click “Crossing Ireland” for the opening essay. More about Angela Alaimo O’Donnell.

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ON LEAVING ÉIRE

She is all blue, air & earth, sea & sky.

She is bog, the color of ruin.

She is a long song across the water.

I don’t belong.

I could make my self a life there.

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CROSSING IRELAND: "FIR/MNA" by ANGELA ALAIMO O'DONNELL

The tenth of twelve poems in Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s series. Click “Crossing Ireland” for the opening essay. More about Angela Alaimo O’Donnell.

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FIR/MNA

Here in the corner of the world-as-was

the old words still speak true. The Skellig Ring

around the rose of Kerry’s coast drops us

down mountains to Gaeltacht shore. The waves sing

the same song on the newer coast we know

but in strange language and a minor key.

The same things happen, but they happen slow.

The names for us different as you from me.

Here I am mna to your fir,

small swells in a surge of Irish thrust

as if a syllable were enough

to circumscribe our being here.

You face the wind and call to me,

my name as foreign as that sea.

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CROSSING IRELAND: "HOMAGE to ST. SEAMUS" by ANGELA ALAIMO O'DONNELL

The ninth of twelve poems in Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s series. Click “Crossing Ireland” for the opening essay. More about Angela Alaimo O’Donnell.

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HOMAGE to ST. SEAMUS

“I rhyme to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.”

Seamus Heaney

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For years I’ve knelt at your holy wells

and envied the cut of your clean-edged song,

lay down in the bog where dead men dwell,

grieved with ghosts who told their wrongs.

Your consonants cleave my soft palate.

I taste their music and savor it long

past the last line of the taut sonnet,

its rhyming subtle, its accent strong.

And every poem speaks a sacrament,

blood of blessing, bread of the word,

feeding me full in language ancient

as Árann’s rock and St. Kevin’s birds.

English will never be the same.

To make it ours is why you came.

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CROSSING IRELAND: "INIS MÓR TOUR" by ANGELA ALAIMO O'DONNELL

The eighth poem in Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s series. Click “Crossing Ireland” for the opening essay. More about Angela Alaimo O’Donnell.

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INIS MÓR TOUR

Tomás, the crazy man of Árann

waved his worn map at me,

his red minibus idling patiently.

I’ll take ye on tour in yer very own van,

the 80-Euro fee, he promised, a steal.

We were charmed, fooled, dumbed into the deal.

Great stout fellows! he bellowed at the seals

who wallowed on the island’s western shore

as if they’d heard and answered him before.

He told the same 3 jokes: seven t’ousand stone

walls on the island, though I don’t know

who counted ‘em! he’d intone,

then laugh the mirthless laugh of the mad

while we all stared straight ahead

hoping he’d keep the van on the road

wracked with glee at the touring Yanks who

came so far to see mere rocks

and paid 80 Euro to do so

(that being the 4^th joke—the one he would think

and not tell, savor it in his thoughts

as he’d wave to his neighbors with a sly wink).

We made his day. And he made ours, if truth

be told about an islandful of lies.

There’s no romance in being marooned,

no great honor or special dignity

living life at the mercy of the merciless sea.

The truth not on his tongue was in his eyes—

the profit in what fools prize.

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CROSSING IRELAND: "ON PILGRIMAGE" by ANGELA ALAIMO O'DONNELL

The seventh poem in Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s series. Click “Crossing Ireland” for the opening essay. More about Angela Alaimo O’Donnell

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ON PILGRIMAGE

Glendalough Monastery

They’re great ones for travel, the Irish Saints,

or so the map announces with its names

of mountains, towns, and old holy wells.

Brigid loved Liscannor’s Hag’s Head grandeur—

and the ground gushed in sympathy, healed all harm

long after she left to tend the fires of Kildare.

Patrick climbed the Croagh above Clew Bay

and hove a great bell past the edge

ringing in the era of snake-less Éire,

while Brendan rowed his Bantry boat from coast

to coast, baptizing pagans and blessing babies,

before setting out, at last, for America

like so many of his kin and kind

in centuries to come. How rare the saint

who homes, the blackbird hatching in his hand.

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Dave Walsh photo.com

CROSSING IRELAND; "SPIDEIL ROAD, GALWAY BAY II" by ANGELA ALAIMO O'DONNELL

The sixth poem in Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s series. Click “Crossing Ireland” for the opening essay. More about Angela Alaimo O’Donnell

SPIDEIL ROAD, GALWAY BAY II

Here at the margin of the world all is edge.

Rock juts against green hedge,

the sea cuts a long knife of shore,

sky meets sand in a bleared scrim,

all muffled in a cotton of fog.

Amid the blab of the pub

I’m made to feel welcome.

Then the savage cut,

sudden as blood,

struck by the stranger

or, worse, my child

irked by my joy and banter.

I fade into that fog,

walk among the ghosts

as I hear the dead tales

told of me:

she was a nuisance

and our great fool.

The wounds still fresh,

today I eye

the same sea & earth & sky

with a difference.

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Photo by Charles R. Hale

CROSSING IRELAND: GAINING MY NAME by ANGELA ALAIMO O'DONNELL

The fifth poem in Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s series. Click “Crossing Ireland” for the opening essay. More about Angela Alaimo O’Donnell

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GAINING MY NAME

I’ve gained this name by marriage, in case

you’re wondering how a Guinea like me

comes to claim a Celtic ancestry.

And those three big boys I birthed are half

enough Irish, making me holy

as any other on this mother-loving shore.

I’m an exile, too, and an islander,

the cliff and stone of Sicily as high

and hard as yours, only the skies are bluer

and the names are nearer to mine,

rich with vowels sung from a southern sea.

Born Alaimo, I’ll die O’Donnell.

Both names claim a world for me.

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CROSSING IRELAND: SPIDEIL ROAD, GALWAY BAY by ANGELA ALAIMO O’DONNELL

The fourth poem in Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s series, “Crossing Ireland.” The next poem in the series will appear on Monday, March 10. Here’s the link to the essay that began the series “Crossing Ireland”

More about Angela Alaimo O’Donnell

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SPIDEIL ROAD, GALWAY BAY

My head so full of earth, words won’t hold it,

English syllables never shaped to these contours,

its wind-etched rock and wide sky fit for rune.

There is a solemn strangeness to this place,

a weathered air that holds its past

sorrows as if they were not past.

I can not count the beauty of towns,

the grace of wilder spaces

and guide them into easy lines.

Like the narrow lanes that map

this well-walked ground, my mind

moves along margins

urgent for the center,

the hidden heart I long to enter.

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CROSSING IRELAND: TIGH MHOLLY by ANGELA ALAIMO O'DONNELL

The third of twelve poems from Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s suite of poems, “Crossing Ireland.” More about Angela Alaimo O’Donnell

TIGH MHOLLY

Yer makin’ the Yanks’ Tour, are ye?

Peadar said, Cian smiling behind the bar

pouring 4 pints for his new American friends,

our 100-mile drive from Kerry to here

amusing to a man for whom the next

county is another country away.

He told us the history of the pub,

the clock that stopped at Mholly’s daughter’s birth

a century gone, ticked past the time

while he walked us from stone room to stone room

naming the faces in the Stations on the walls,

a Celtic Virgil leading a mis-guided tour.

All the while we drank the famous Guinness

drawn from Mholly’s lines laid long ago

making it the best on the Spidéil Road,

while we argued poetry, Barack O’Bama,

the slant of the light on Conemara cliffs,

no new thing fine as the old.

What he knew he knew sure as his own hand

and wouldn’t take no for an answer:

Heaney was a hack, Donegal men dishonest,

and An Clochán as far as you’ll need to go

should you need to leave home for awhile

and you know you’ll be needing to come back.