Sicilan – Artists Without Walls

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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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

Tag: Sicilan