THE REAL REASON FOR GOING IS NOT JUST TO GET THERE

Killarney’s maps are for the unredeemed.

The hidden land awaits the stumblers

and the temporarily confused who find

their destinations as they go.

In Dingle there’s a history

bone-final as the faith

that founded Gallarus.

All

that remains is what was there

when Gallarus began: God,

man, sheep, and stone

and stone and stone.

Dingles

ago the starvers saw their lips

turn green from chewing grass

before they famished in their beds.

Their hovels bleach like tombs

unroofed and riven by the sea.

If only all the stones were beige

or marble-white…

Their fading

grays seem unforgiving as a fate

that only wit or tears

or emigration can defeat.

Sheep graze over graves.

Loud gulls convene on garbage

dumps.

In Galway, Cashel

and Tralee, I fish the air

for what it is that makes

the Irish Irish.

Is it Seamus

speaking Sweeney’s prayer

in Howth and telling me of Hopkins,

“the convert,” buried in Glasnevin?

Is it how it sounds to sing

the music in a name: Skibbereen,

Balbriggan, Kilbeggan, Bunratty,

Listowel, Duncannon, Fermanagh

and Ballyconneely?

Is it Joyce’s

map of metaphors that makes

all Dublin mythical as Greece?

Is it cairns of uniambic and unrhyming

rocks transformed by hand

into the perfect poem of a wall?

Is it the priest near death

who whispered, “Give my love

to Roscommon, and the horses

of Roscommon”?

Is it because

the Irish pray alike for “Pope

John Paul, our bishop Eamon, and

Ned O’Toole, late of Moycullen”?

Inside God’s house or out

their sadder smiles say the world,

if given time, will break your heart.

With such a creed they should

believe in nothing but the wisdom

of suspicion.

Instead they say,

“Please God,” and fare ahead

regardless of the odds to show

that life and God deserve at least

some trust, some fearlessness, some courtesy.

For Anne Mullin Burnham

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