Waking up today being Irish after all
Who can argue with Rosie’s determination
The name fits the face a bit of leprechaun
No doubt there’s a thread woven into my genes.
Not the Boston Irish with the Kennedy accent
That’s not us, as I was told emphatically as a child
But that famous actor from the year of my birth
He was Irish and I have his name.
Thanks to him I am hidden from an internet search
Buried among so many thousands of matches
Needing my birthdate in any doctor’s office
To identify me within my duplicate name cohort.
Did I celebrate the centenary of the Easter Rebellion?
Rosie wants to know, who enjoys my poetry
As if it flows from the blood spilled resisting
The English landlords taxing and starving my people.
No but yes I align myself with all of the oppressed
Including the African Americans with my surname
Making no mistake slaveholders are in my family tree
My surname dispersed around the British Empire.
I was raised as a son of New Hampshire
Born there of parents born there of grandparents and back and back
Hearing about the Epping country doctor of local renown
Who was born a nobody on a hardscrabble farm in Marlow.
Settled in the back woods quite some time before
The potato famine caused the wave of refugees
Those are my roots as I was told when I asked
But I found something else later in life.
Our traditional family Christmas dinner dessert
When I searched for the recipe to make one myself
The chocolate steamed pudding with hard sauce
Turns out to be Irish named pudding not English.
So for sure there’s an Irish cultural history there
Passed down through the generations in a stained recipe
My mother not knowing the meaning while serving us
Delicious heritage that my father at the table denied.
