GO HOME
“Go home”, she sighed, “go back while you still can”.
A limp autumn sun coaxed us to linger
on a faded park bench in London town where
a brazen squirrel had scurried up un-announced
to gaze on me like a cheeky child;
then, chastising him, but humourously,
my voice had sprung a dark tune
in her grey-haired noble head
sculpted by winds long still
softened by mists long dead
A Cork lilt had
un-plugged her wishing well of tears for home
un-fastening old wounds to burst with bitter pus of exile
un-stuck, up-rooted
un-suckled, un-settled
shoved out
dry of milk
wet with bile
“I should never have come” softly
“There was nothing here for me” sadly
“but it’s heart-warming to hear your voice” she smiled.
(finbarwright/copyright/xv.xi.mmvii)
Note
This poem has its setting in the autumn of 1987 in London, where I was studying at the Guildhall School of Music. It describes a chance meeting with an elderly lady from Ireland whom I had never met before or since. She was hopelessly heartbroken at having left Ireland so many years before. Her pain was so intense that her dramatic yet dignified out-pouring of her life-story gave me an insight into the sufferings of her generation and the hardship of emigration that I had not imagined until then. Her maternal words of warning and advice have stayed in my mind to this day.