Poetry inspired by my family who had to leave
Send no more snaps
‘Send no more snaps of yeerselves,
We know what ye look like.
Send us pictures of Lincoln,
Dollar bills!’
The long- awaited letter from home
Proved justification of the weary choice
To take the boat and leave them
To their grasping.
Snatch away
At our absence.
The quote is a paraphrase of a letter written from Ireland to an emigrant in the USA. For me it expresses something of sadness of the emigrant finding exploitation instead of encouragement, even from those who are his family ‘at home’.
Over there
Missing presumed wastrel.
Absent from the daily inspection.
Overseas with his sister.
Adjudged a loser.
Shocked no-one dying young.
A surprising condemnation
Of an uneventful life
A verdict built
On the sure foundation
Of ignorance.
‘How could he have been happy
So far from home and folk?
How could he have been any good
And we not know of it?’
Inspired by the discovery that a cousin of mine who was said to have died a young alcoholic on the streets of New York in fact lived a fairly uneventful life until he died undramatically in middle age.
Johnny
Thought he had land.
Lost it.
Went away to find
Nothing.
Found a bottled fright to haunt him
Shook it off and achieved solitude.
Put a prayer-gap between himself and grief
Until it mugged him on the street
Late morning Saturday
After Mass near Holloway.
Thoughts about the death of a cousin of mine, and others like him. I am exercised by the dignity of the man, chasing away his demons, falling and rising, in life and in death in London.
Burying Johnny
Died Holloway
Buried Aughrim.
Hard for me
To lead his Vigil Mass
Farewell to London.
Hard but proud,
There before street-filled pews
Each stumbling shuffler a daughter or brother.
Thinking back to mother’s second glances
At daylong drinkers
By the Clapham Common tube.
Had Johnny popped up south?
‘Woman, behold your cousin’.
See the strength too
Of the escapees,
Wary victims of daylight nightmare
Daily ambushed by former slavery
Johnny, exile and escapee,
We’ll bury you in Aughrim.
London town
Couldn’t hold you down.
Words related to the Requiem Mass for my cousin Johnny celebrated in London before his body returned to Ireland for burial. The congregation included many street people such as he had been for many years.
During those years his London cousins saw him in every lost soul on the street.
Broken spades
Mid 1840s,
Michael home from Iowa
Came to claim
His family fields.
Their small and blighted crop
Starved his hope.
Six sons
Swore that they would never dig
In Ballyglass
Another spud.
Broke their spades for good.
Eight ready for the boat,
Liverpool
And onward west.
Where the rot
Cannot.
Hogs in Iowa
On windy Temple Hill
Rest Michael, Martin and many brothers
Immigrants whose driving energies
Rest in peace.
Letters home measured
Profit in pigs
Success in sows
Happiness in hogs
Their frequent litters
God’s abiding blessing.
In Cascade where they lived
Now dwell descendants
The progeny of hardy types long past
There by the well
No porch but a pen
No tables but a trough
No humans now but hogs
Close to home
Their ancestry assured,
Chewing
Over family roots.
On ‘pilgrimage’ to Michael and Martin Kenny’s homesteads in Iowa, USA, I was struck by the ubiquity of hogs. Hogs are mentioned in their letters of the Kenny emigrants as a sign of their burgeoning wealth. Immigration posters in Ellis Island promise abundance in the New World in the form of porcine property.
Ironically, the only residents of the site of Martin Kenny’s homestead are hogs. An ancient hand-powered water pump alone recalls the humans.
In this Animal Farm, the hogs took over?
A Wondering Return 