Celery Farm Saturday afternoon June 4, 2016

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feeding birds not squirrels June 3, 2016

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being Irish

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.

house wren day 5 June 1, 2016

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