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Student Independent News

NUI Galway Student Newspaper

Things I Didn’t Know I Loved: Ireland

April 23, 2019 By SIN Staff

By Libby Falk Jones

Visiting Lecturer, English/Berea College, Kentucky USA

 

After Nazim Hikmet, Turkish poet exiled from his beloved homeland

 

I didn’t know I loved rain, yes, rain misting my face,

droplets catching in my eyelashes and the thick hard rain

seen from my window, my rainpants and boots worth their weight

when it’s time for class.  I didn’t know I loved moss, tenacious

green on stones, spongy under my feet, and grass—today

a bumblebee drowsed, ignoring the tiny white ground daisies,

which I also love, and lichens, earth-brown and green

on rowan trunks, and gorse, brilliant yellow dotting hillsides.

 

I didn’t know I loved “Mind yourself” and “God bless,” “Give it

a lash,” “Take a listen,” “For the craic,” “She’s chesty,” “Grand

on this end.” Caramel muffins, Irish chicken, roosters mashed

and curled into a ball by a wrist flick, Chef Maria’s luscious salads

in An Bhialann.  Summer fruits jam from the Saturday market,

poitin and its heritage. Tea, tea, tea and the Cloud Café for

cheerful hot water refills.

 

I didn’t know I loved remote places, Inis Mor’s Black Fort,

mussel lines strung across Connemara lakes, limestone barrens

of The Burren.  How could I know I loved ruined castles,

abandoned friaries whose roofs open to the sky, stone walls

stacked with spaces for the wind (“if you build ‘em tight,

they go over”), everywhere stones, Famine walls snaking up

hillsides.  Burning evening skies over the quad, frisky horses

in fields I walk past daily, the neighbor’s Irish cat, those cocky

magpies. Lone pair of swans, way up the Corrib.  One bright

morning, a glowing red fox in our yard.

 

I didn’t know I how much I loved Irish voices, Synge’s Aran Islands,

Heaney and Yeats and Boland, RTE’s Sunday Miscellany’s poets

and essayists, the throng of NUIG writers.  I didn’t know I loved

the shrieks of gulls, no water in sight, rhythms of oars in racing shells

on the river.  Didn’t know I loved the smell of fresh-cut March grass,

raked into rows, scent of sheets dried on a line.  How warm sun can be,

and the sharp cut of the wind, reminding me of the claims of earth.

 

I didn’t know I’d love my students, and all they have brought

to our work, their poems and stories of mums and grans, of men

who work with their hands, The Troubles and madness, dirty words

and pubs and grief, churches and laughter, crows and sloths, sounds

of the sea and family—always family.  Their joy in finding a space

where words and images can breathe, a page ready to receive their gifts

as they’ve learned to listen, to attend.  I’ve loved their different voices

intertwining, writers working together, trying out new tongues.

Their patience, teaching me to sing the special music of their names.

 

SIN Staff
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Filed Under: Creative Corner Tagged With: Ireland, Libby Falk Jones, Poem, Poetry

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