To not forget by Sacha Hutchinson (THOUGHTS ABOUT THE EARTH Series)

To not forget
by Sacha Hutchinson

Forget not
evening song
of stone chat in
newfound silence
it chinks like
breaking
glass.

Forget not
empty roads with
bicycle smiles
uncut verges
alive with scent
colour and insects.

Forget not
green spring rain
a drizzle that waits
as if frightened to fall.

Forget not
the moon, its ice
blue quarter
the lemon line
of dropping light.

Forget not
when we noticed
the unfastening of
leaf, wing, flower.

Forget never this
stolen time, when
shattered Earth
rested.

PHOTO: Spring meadow (Ireland) by Jonas Fehre.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: This short poem looks back at lockdown and how we were restricted in our activity and movement. We were able to go for short walks near where we lived, many discovered or rediscovered the natural world. This slowing and restriction allowed wildlife to recover. We need to learn from this and reduce travel. It is important to appreciate and protect our local habitat. Protecting our planet is an enormous task but starting at a local level is always possible.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Sacha Hutchinson is an eye doctor working in Galway, Ireland. She was born in Dublin. She attends both a weekly poetry workshop with Kevin Higgins  and  many Over The Edge events. Her poetry has appeared in Ropes (2018), in the  2018 and 2021 spring editions of Skylight 47, the 2019 autumn edition of The Curlew, impspired volume 3, Live Encounters (June 2020),  Pendemic (May 2021), Drawn to the Light Press (February 2021), Poetry in Lockdown Archive (UCD 2021), and Lothlorien Poetry Journal (2021). Shortlisted for Poetry for Patients in 2018 and 2019, she was longlisted for Over the Edge  New Writer of the Year in 2018 and shortlisted in 2019. A featured reader of Over the Edge November 2021, she received a bachelor of Arts in art and design in 2010. She has an interest in exploring the environmental message through paint and poetry.

Dear Guest of Westport House & Gardens by Roberta Beary (LANDMARKS Series)

Dear Guest of Westport House & Gardens
by Roberta Beary

House tours are canceled and the cafe closed
Pandemics wax and tourists wane
Times change

Once Lords and Ladies ruled these walks supreme
They traced their blood to Grace
The Pirate Queen

A hotel dynasty now holds the deed
Times change
Pandemics wax and tourists wane

Mind where barbed wire meets old chapel ground
Sheep graze near graves of nobles
Titled Browne

Times change
Pandemics wax and tourists wane
Please take your litter with you when you leave

PHOTO: Westport House, County Mayo, Ireland, by Gabriela Insuratelu, used by permission.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Westport House, a stately home in County Mayo, Ireland, was built by the Browne family, Irish peerage and descendants of Grace O’Malley, the Pirate Queen who ruled the west of Ireland in the 16th century. During the Covid-19 lockdown, when car travel was restricted, the owners of Westport House kindly opened its grounds to locals. This poem grew out of my walks among its lovely gardens.

PHOTO: The author during a visit to Westport House grounds and gardens (2020). Photo by Frank Stella. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Roberta Beary’s second collection of short poems, Carousel, is co-winner of the Snapshot Press 2019 book award contest. Her first short-form collection, The Unworn Necklace, received a finalist book award from the Poetry Society of America. Her collection of prose poetry, Deflection, was named a National Poetry Month Best Pick by Washington Independent Review of Books. A long-term editor at Modern Haiku, she lives in the west of Ireland with her husband, Frank Stella, and tweets her photoku and micro-poetry on Twitter @shortpoemz. Read more at her website or on Facebook.

Author portrait by Henry Denander

An Irishman’s home is his…porous border?? by Robert O’Mochain (MY FRONT DOOR Series)

An Irishman’s home is his…porous border??
by Robert O’Mochain

My childhood home had an unlocked front door that welcomed customers, friends, acquaintances, and all manner of wayfarers. The joys of having a motor business next door in 1970s rural Ireland! At any moment of the day, Mam would hear a tap on the glass section of the front door or a quick rap on its silver letter slot that bore the word “litir” in Celtic script, a reflection of the enthusiasm of Irish language revivalists back in the 1930s. “Could you change a cheque for me, missus,” shouted across the glass panel by a farmer in cow-shit wellingtons. “Is the young lad there to wash the car?” would dispatch me to the carwash and cow-shit vehicles.

My scopic drive absorption in the glittering images of television was shattered by those friends of the family who dropped by every now and then with no particular purpose in mind. They updated us on what they had heard and asked us what we had heard about the people who formed the warp and weft of community imagination. Who was in hospital, who had died, what were the wake and funeral arrangements; who was getting married, who were they related to, how many were going to the reception? Voicing out parish banalities in loud but warm voices, the interlopers marred my viewing pleasures and made me dream of the middle-class homes of television world. In that world, people would ring the doorbell of sturdy front doors, they would arrive for the party, they would leave at the appointed time. I suspected that world might be a product of fantasy.

Now, my childhood world seems like fantasy. I live secure and solitary in my apartment, protected by intercom and politeness. “Something’s lost and something’s gained.”

Photo by Gleren Meneghin on Unsplash

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Robert O’Mochain belongs to Ritsumeikan University’s College of International Relations in Kyoto, Japan. His modest literary endeavours include public readings of Yeats, essays on Irish patriot Sir Roger Casement, and efforts to find a publisher for an essay on Beckett’s “Not I.”

Lost, poem by Rona Fitzgerald (BEACH AND POOL MEMORIES Poetry and Prose Series)

Lost
by Rona Fitzgerald

Summer days she’d set out with four of us on the bus,
bag laden with cosies, sandwiches, spare clothes.

Infinite blue, sea and sky merging, no frontiers.
Bird beat, waders, oystercatchers, zen-like herons.

We stood on one leg until we fell, splashed about
ate our sand-filled lunch as mother’s nose twitched.

Trudged home across the long bridge trailing
wet wool togs and towels. Back to order.

My heart’s in those grainy dunes
keening sea birds summon me home.

PHOTO: Bull Island Sanctuary, Dublin 1960. The author is the child front left, crossed legs and shading her eye.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I wrote the poem from memory — starting with the infinity idea and the zen-like herons. Part of the prompt for me is living away from Dublin and the sea which was part of my life as a place to swim and walk. I miss the light. Normally my Dad would not be with us, my mother would haul the bags and shepherd us smaller kids to the beach.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Rona Fitzgerald was born in Dublin and has been living in Glasgow for 20 years. She is the second youngest of seven children. Her work has been included in a number of magazines and anthologies, including the Dublin-based Stinging Fly, New Voices Press anthologies and The Wait poetry anthology edited by George Sandifer-Smith. Her poem “Nocturne’” was published in Scottish Book Trust publication Journeys. “Solstice” was published as part of the Mid-Winter Special on Three Drops from Cauldron webzine, and “Quest’” was published on the webzine I am not a Silent Poet. Rona is a member of the Federation of Writers (Scotland).

It’s with O’Leary in the Grave, prose by Hal O’Leary (SAME NAME Poetry and Prose Series)

It’s with O’Leary in the Grave
by Hal O’Leary

With my grandfather having been born in County Cork, Ireland, I suppose it’s only natural that I would use an opportunity like this to express my pride in being Irish. Although I am well aware that not all Irishmen are admirable, I take my pride from such great ones as John O’Leary, the great Irish Separatist. He, as I would like to think of myself, was a staunch fighter against injustice in whatever form and wherever it might exist.

At the tender age of 19, in an attempt to rescue fellow separatist from jail, O’Leary was imprisoned for a week. In 1865, and then at the age of 35, he was arrested and later tried on charges of high treason. The charge was later reduced to “treason felony” and he was sentenced to 20 years penal servitude of which five years were spent in English prisons. In 1871 he was released in exile. In his exile, he lived mainly in Paris, but he remained active in the, IRB. (Irish Republic Brotherhood). With the termination of his exile he returned to Ireland, where he and his sister Ellen O’Leary both became Important within Dublin cultural and national circles, which included the likes of W. B. Yeats.

In addition to fighting injustice, John O’Leary, like myself, attended college but never obtained a degree, and like myself he was a lover of the arts, poetry in particular. It was his great friend Yeats who immortalized him in the poem, “September 1913” with each verse ending with the line,

“Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, it’s with O’Leary in the grave.”

IMAGE: “John O’Leary” by John Butler Yeats (1904).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Hal O’Leary, now at age 90, has been published in 18 different countries He lives by a quote from his son’s play Wine To Blood, “I don’t know if there is a Utopia, but I am certain that we must act as though there can be.” Hal, a Pushcart nominee, is a recent recipient of an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from West Liberty University, the same institution from which he became a college dropout some 60 years earlier. He currently resides in Wheeling, West Virginia.

September 1913
by William Butler Yeats

What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone;
For men were born to pray and save:
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

Yet they were of a different kind,
The names that stilled your childish play,
They have gone about the world like wind,
But little time had they to pray
For whom the hangman’s rope was spun,
And what, God help us, could they save?
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

Yet could we turn the years again,
And call those exiles as they were
In all their loneliness and pain,
You’d cry, ‘Some woman’s yellow hair
Has maddened every mother’s son’:
They weighed so lightly what they gave.
But let them be, they’re dead and gone,
They’re with O’Leary in the grave.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms. Yeats was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and, along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn, and others, founded the Abbey Theatre, where he served as its chief during its early years. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature,  the first Irishman so honored, for what the Nobel Committee described as “inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation.” Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after receiving the Nobel Prize. (SOURCE: wikipedia.org.)

Fishamble Street. Dublin. by Stephen McGuinness (Where I Live Poetry & Photography Series)

Fishamble Street.
Dublin.
by Stephen McGuinness

I work
my way along
Fishamble Street.
where Handel
first aired
his Messiah.
It takes me
from the heights
and glories
of Christchurch Cathedral
down, to see
the wretched pagan river
at Wood Quay.
From arched red brick
on the Blind Boys’ School
past the restoration theatre
on Smock Alley.
The oldest surviving
street in Dublin
meanders from
the ancient
Black Pool
from which the city
takes its name
to the place
where the norse
longships came in
to raid
and to winter.
Later, where they walked
their ox carts
up the hill
to market
winding between
mud huts and cesspits.
I follow that
same path
still going against
the flow.
Descending from
the high ground
and the High Church
to the lost
and the low
life of the Liffey.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Fishamble Street still follows the same path, in the centre of Dublin, as when it was laid out by the Viking founders of the city in the 10th century.

PHOTOGRAPH: “Oldest continuously inhabited house in Dublin” (Fishamble Street), found at this website.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Stephen McGuinness, 46, works as a chef in Dublin City, Ireland. His poems have been published online on Eat Sleep Write and by Silver Birch Press in the I AM WAITING Poetry Series.

St. Patrick’s Day, poem by Jean McKishnie Blewett

ST. PATRICK’S DAY
by Jean McKishnie Blewett

There’s an Isle, a green Isle, set in the sea,
Here’s to the Saint that blessed it!
And here’s to the billows wild and free
That for centuries have caressed it!

Here’s to the day when the men that roam
Send longing eyes o’er the water!
Here’s to the land that still spells home
To each loyal son and daughter!

Here’s to old Ireland—fair, I ween,
With the blue skies stretched above her!
Here’s to her shamrock warm and green,
And here’s to the hearts that love her!

ILLUSTRATION: “Ireland Watercolor Map” by Michael Tompsett. Prints available at fineartamerica.com.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree, poem by William Butler Yeats

THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE
by William Butler Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

BACKGROUND: When Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was a child, his father read to him from Walden, by Henry David Thoreau. While a teenager, Yeats wished to imitate Thoreau by living on Innisfree, an uninhabited island in Lough Gill [County Sligo, Ireland]. Yeats would visit the land at Lough Gill at night — the trips taking him from the streets of Sligo to the remote areas around the lake, offering the contrasting images of the city and nature that appear in the poem’s text. While living in London, Yeats would walk down Fleet Street and long for the seclusion of a pastoral setting such as the isle. The sound of water coming from a fountain in a shop window reminded Yeats of the lake, and it is this inspiration that Yeats credits for the creation of the poem, written in 1888, when he was 23. (Read more at wikipedia.org.)

PHOTO: “Isle of Innisfree, Lough Gill, Country Sligo, Ireland” by the Irish Image Collection. Prints available at fineartamerica.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms. Yeats was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and, along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn, and others, founded the Abbey Theatre, where he served as its chief during its early years. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature,  the first Irishman so honored, for what the Nobel Committee described as “inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation.” Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after receiving the Nobel Prize. (SOURCE: wikipedia.org.)

Joy and Tragedy, Quote by William Butler Yeats

“Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.” WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, Irish Poet and Dramatist (1865-1939)

Painting: “Blue William Butler Yates,” acrylic on canvas by Frank Cullen. Find prints of the portrait at fineartamerica.com.

Bill Clinton Reads William Butler Yeats

A prolific reader, former U.S. President Bill Clinton in 2003 released a list of his 21 favorite books. Clinton, who honors his Irish ancestry, has a special place in his heart for  Irish poet William Butler Yeats. To celebrate Bill’s love of poetry and Will’s poetic genius, we include below one of our favorite Yeat’s poems.

WHEN YOU ARE OLD
by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.