Reposting for #PoetryDayIRL
Remembering home from afar…
And so again I found myself,
Of a morning, that morning,
On a winding road, once more,
Meandering like a stream,
Before it opened up to unveil
A vast expanse of stillness
Where brook and lake entwined,
Rugged roads wandered into wilder woods
And the light, that sat
Upon mossy mountain,
Reflected the break of another
Boorishly boisterous day
In a landscape where Yeats,
Having left the Mauds of his world
To fight the battle without him,
Had climbed nightly
The Thoor Ballylee
To find rest and I revelled
In what it meant to be connected
To these often harsh,
Sometimes barren,
But seldom anything less
Than breathtaking lands.
Immense clouds hanging on the horizon,
Fertile lands out front,
Awash with the 40 shades
And a silence amid so much
Awe-inspiring nature
That the Emerald in her name
Seemed so justified.
And yet, as if forever ingrained and known
But for a moment forgotten,
From somewhere deep inside
Resurfaced the notion
That it was not these lands
That I missed but
The memory of laughter
That blew above these lands,
On the breeze that crossed
Fields of verdant greens,
That skirted over grass
Waiting to be grazed on
And found rest in trees
That longed for lovers to kiss beneath.
And then, as normal as the nodding of the cap
To the passing stranger along the roadside,
I was taken back to those lucidly liquid days
Shining from my youth
When the patriotic spirit
Of a nation,
So small but spirited,
More laughed with
Than laughed at,
Doused itself in shamrocks
And drowned itself merrily
In spirits of an altogether other nature,
A time when neighbours
Knew each other like family
And a new face in town
Was merely a friend
We did not yet know…
And there I stood, home again,
Spun on that same laughing breeze
Into the past and I saw before me
The Me of today reflected
In my childhood form of yesterday
With teddy in one hand
And Tayto’s in the other,
Smiling amid laughter I had heard
But was far too young to understand,
In a land that I’ve fled so far from,
Swept up and away
On other breezes,
And yet, however high I fly
Or however much I roam,
I never seem to feel too far
From that Fair Green Isle called home.
All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly
Damien B. Donnelly 