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.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day

 –

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: "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.

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.


Skelligs

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.

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 4th 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; "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

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.

Beara-Peninsula-West-Cork

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

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.

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CROSSING IRELAND: COUNTY KERRY by ANGELA ALAIMO O'DONNELL

Angela Alaimo O’Donnell has had a few flirtations with the notion of “Being Irish.” Given that March seems to belong to the Irish, she has written a  brief essay, along with a suite of poems called “Crossing Irish.” This is the second of twelve poems. More about Angela Alaimo O’Donnell

 

——– 

 

COUNTY KERRY

in the shadow of MacGillycuddy Reeks 

Unreal, the way we walk among them

full of our bangers and eggs,

clad in our smart mackintoshes

and good boots, safe from the rain

that pierces them like bullets from a dark god.

There is death out here in the beauty.

A hunger remembered in the earth.

The mountain rises slant, like mercy.

The slow slope of light eases the grace

under all the suffering and sorrow,

beyond the dark-ringed eyes of the haunted

whose hunger can know no end.

 –

We call it drama, romance, history.

We trespass on their mystery.

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CROSSING IRISH: WANTING TO BE IRISH by ANGELA ALAIMO O'DONNELL

Angela Alaimo O’Donnell is a poet and professor at Fordham University in New York City where she teaches English, Creative Writing, and American Catholic Studies. Her most recent book of poems, Waking My Mother,  a collection of elegies focused on the relationships between mothers and daughters. has been published by Word Press in Fall 2013.  Her previous book, Saint Sinatra & Other Poems (May 2011), was been nominated for the Arlin G. Meyer Prize in Imaginative Writing.

 

Angela has had a few flirtations with the notion of “Being Irish.” Given that March seems to belong to the Irish, she has written a brief essay, along with a suite of poems she wrote called “Crossing Irish.”  The poems are devoted to the theme of wanting to be Irish.

 

Today we are presenting Angela’s essay and the first of twelve poems. The rest of Angela’s poems will be posted in the days leading up to St Patrick’s Day. 
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———-

CROSSING IRISH

         By Angela Alaimo O’Donnell

 

Brennan and Angela O'Donnell
Brennan and Angela O’Donnell

           As a child, I never wanted to be Irish.  This was a convenient circumstance, since I wasn’t. (My Irish name is my husband’s gift to this Sicilian girl.) 

 

            Then I grew up and fell in love with poetry—English poetry first, then American poetry, and then, finally, fully, fatally, I fell in love with Irish poetry.  The yearning of Yeats, the wicked wit of Kavanagh, the heart and heft of Heaney—all of them spoke to me, or rather, sang to me, in voices that were at once distinctly their own and also the collective voice of their common clan.  It was then that I wanted in.

 

Angela in Sligo
Angela in Sligo

            This itch to be Irish only got worse when I visited Ireland for the first time.  Once our plane set down on Shannon’s tarmac (holy ground), once we got in our rental car and started driving across the glorious West of Ireland, I recognized the landscape as though it were my own.  Irish poetry—with its deep rooting in the past, its mists of memory, its hard love of the hard land—had claimed me, planted in me the bizarre belief that I belonged to Ireland.  I felt a sense of homecoming I’ve felt in only one other place in the world—Sicily, my true ancestral island from which my grandparents emigrated 100 years ago.  

 

           

The Ring of Kerry
The Ring of Kerry

Though Ireland & Sicily might seem to have little in common—one ruled by rain, the other sun—they share much:  a rich history of miraculous happenings; a penchant for saint-making; a fierce pride in their separateness, their exiled state;  a wild & wonderful language that makes ordinary English and Italian sound strait-jacketed, tied-up, and tame.

           

As a child, I never wanted to be Irish.  Now, as an adult, I do (oh, I do).

 

            Happily, as a poet, I’ve found a way to claim this invented identity—or, at least, to imagine it—through poetry.  The poems that follow belong to a series called, “Crossing Irish,” a suite of poems I wrote five years ago during another visit to that Island of the Blessed.  For all of you Irish readers out there, I hope this Italian-American wannabe’s work might not seem presumptuous.  For all of you non-Irish readers who are also lovers of Ireland—well, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

 

——–

ON NOT BELONGING TO IRELAND

 

Our Aer Lingus flies through Irish skies,

and I know I’m not at home

well before my feet touch the Tarmac.

 

Filing into Shannon, we take our places

in the long line of Irish ex-pats

whose cousins left as hopeful as they arrive.

 

Here I am clear extra, exotic

by Irish measure, if not New York’s,

my dark hair and olive hands a sign.

 

You don’t look Catholic, says the ex-priest

who left Queens and his cassock behind

for this spot at Hughes’ bar, An Spidéil.

 

Italian—or Jew—what’s the difference?

says the glint in his Irish eye.

Nothing of you begins here, where we do—

 

his American accent stronger than mine,

me with my traitorous poet’s ear

who loves all music better than my own.

 

At two weeks’ end, I’ll speak with a lilt,

the song of the Island sown in my dreams,

my foreign heart more native than she seems.