St. Padraig's Day and Two Favorite Irish Poets

I have two very favorite Irish poets, both of whom are gone from this earthly sphere, but whose words both challenge me and bring me comfort: I suppose one could call that perspective. The first of them is Galway Kinnell, a poet I was blessed to meet one fine summer day at the Frost Place, and his lecture was astonishing, his reading was awe-inspiring, and the whole thing is firmly embedded in my memory. I have so many favorite poems from his work, but today, I want to share a section of his long series of poems, "When One has Lived a Long Time Alone." This is section 11:

When one has lived a long time alone,one wants to live again among men and women,to return to that place where one's ties with the humanbroke, where the disquiet of death and now alsoof history glimmers its firelight on faces,where the gaze of the new baby looks past the gazeof the great granny, and where lovers speak,on lips blowsy from kissing, that languagethe same in each mouth, and like birds at daybreakblether the song that is both earth's and heaven's,until the sun has risen, and they standin the light of being made one: kingdom come,when one has lived a long time alone.
This section hits a very deep chord with me, when the speaker says, "one wants to live again among men and women,to return to that place where one's ties with the humanbroke..."
Who among us hasn't had a fractured relationship? Or been sorely disappointed in thefoolishness and ugliness of human behavior? And yet, it's spring, and rebirth and renewal areon the agenda. Forgiveness, right?
And the other poet close to my heart is Seamus Heaney. Again, so many glorious poems, andagain, I find myself drawn today to another series of poems. Heaney's "Clearances" comes to mind, especially section 3:

When all the others were away at Mass

I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.

They broke the silence, let fall one by one

Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:

Cold comforts set between us, things to share

Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.

And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes

From each other's work would bring us to our senses.

So while the parish priest at her bedside

Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying

And some were responding and some crying

I remembered her head bent towards my head,

Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives—

Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

The scene in this beautiful sonnet is clearly drawn: the kitchen, the shared task, "little pleasnt

splashes," and then, after the hard volta, the scene shifts to the death bed and the

invasiveness of it all. The shared task of peeling potatoes for Sunday dinner is sacred, much

more so than the weeping, and the priest exhorting away. 

What these two poems, and the work of the two poets, have in common is the intimacy of

human connection. Silence, rejection, and finally the need to be present, to find the closeness 

lost. Beautiful. And, not to stereotype anything or any one ethnicity, so Irish.

Happy St. Padraig's Day. 

C

May the blessings of light be upon you,

Light without and light within.

And in all your comings and goings,

May you ever have a kindly greeting

From them you meet along the road.