On Holiday: County Clare - Poem

ON HOLIDAY: COUNTY CLARE

   Last night in the pub at the bar
   with the village charmers, and truly
   charming they were--word and eye--

   on the very street under which
   the Atlantic has millenia since
   carved its underworld of caves

   --you can hear them underfoot
   if you listen out on the burren
   like the history here under laughter--

   I saw the back of your head
   it was a younger you but you
   in a man intent on the singing

   I saw the face of you a weightier
   you in the photo above him
   on the wall. Old, old are the caves

   and graygreen the waves
   that run through them each time
   taking a scrim of old limestone

   back to the sea. A girl sang
   an Irish song of lost love, someone
   gone over the very ocean.

LINDA McCARRISTON is Professor in the M.F.A. program at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. Her first collection of poems, Talking Soft Dutch (1984), won an Associated Writing Programs Award. Her second collection, Eva-Mary (1990), won the Terrence Des Pres Prize, and her third collection, Little River (2000), was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has been awarded two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in literature, two Vermont Council on the Arts fellowships, and the Consuelo Ford Award of the Poetry Society of America.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Irish American Cultural Institute
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group