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| Padriac Pearce, Irish poet, 1879-1916 |
I discovered
the root of my love for poetry twenty years ago when traversing Ireland’s
winding roads. A dominant charm of the Emerald Isle is the English language
spoken by the Gaelic tongue. The cost of travel is worth the verse and cadence
of conversation in boisterous pubs and beside cozy peat fires.
However, as my Midwest husband couldn’t understand my
relatives’ speech upon his first visit to my Appalachia, neither could my ear
follow the Irish brogue.
As St. Patrick’s Day approaches, I consider my McCoy-O’Brien
agrarian ancestors and their way of storytelling. I remember my maternal
grandmother’s three books: the Bible in her hands, and a hymnal and songbook kept
on her piano’s music rack. She also read the daily newspaper to keep pace with
her community and new recipes.
A preacher, Granny reprimanded me when I could read music
just enough to plunk out Little Brown Jug
on her piano keys. “Now, git down from my piana! Who taught you how to play
that ole drinkin’ song?”
Guess Granny didn’t know I took violin lessons in
school. As a child, I couldn’t perceive the cultural divide between her life
and my family’s. And I dared not ask why the songbook sat beside the hymnal.
My parents didn’t read books when raising my four
sisters and me. As Granny, they also religiously combed the news.
I acknowledge the responsibilities my parents carried:
the midnight oil my mother burned with her Brothers sewing machine to clothe
her five growing girls.
My parents’ reading habits reflected middle-class
America in Post-WW II’s sprawling suburbs. Our city planners also overlooked
the value of reading literature when they neglected to build libraries within our
neighborhoods.
Meanwhile, nationwide, households traded family stories
and literature for the television.
When my older sister and I entered high-school, Dad provided
us with a set of Encyclopedia Britannica, an expensive and overwhelming feast
of history and information too formidable to comfortably use.
Yet, God is good and put Miss Shingler into my path.
My sophomore English teacher, she quickened the promise of poetry when she led our
class in reading aloud poetry by Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare, to name a
few.
Dear Reader, today I pull a poetry anthology from
my bookshelf and listen to an Irish voice from the early 1900’s.
THE REBEL by Padriac Pearse (1879-1916)
I come of the seed of the people, the people that sorrow,
That have no treasure but hope,
No
riches laid up but a memory
Of
an ancient glory.
My
mother bore me in bondage, in bondage my mother was born,
I
am the blood of serfs;
The children
with whom I have played, the men and women with
whom I have eaten…
Have
worn shameful manacles, have been bitten as at the wrist
by
manacles…
I
say to my people that they are holy…
That
they are greater than those that hold them, and stronger
and purer,
That
they have need of courage, and to call on the name of
their God,
God
the unforgetting, the dear God that loves the peoples for
whom He died naked, suffering
shame.
