Poems from Ireland
by David Edelman

At the First Presbyterian Church, Derry

She wouldn’t touch it, of course, the record
of her great-grandmother’s baptism
held in the hilltop church within the walls
of the old city. But she could feel

the oak floorboards at her feet, run 
her fingers along the beech pews,
see the baptismal font where Margaret
had been christened. She knew

the Bredins and Shaws had been there, 
this sacred place Sarah had wanted
to be married in, for herself and her
family, even if her people were

from the country, flax growers, fresh 
from Ballymagroarty. After so much hope, 
what made them leave fourteen years later 
on that ship to Philadelphia, four children in tow 

on the long journey to Michigan? How much was it 
dissent, the promise of good cheap land, 
letters from Sarah’s aunt and the welcome
from a congregation that could practice freely?

They never went back, and if from a distance
it all seems to have worked out, what
heartache and trouble are we missing, what
grief has been lost in the leaves of time?

Ireland was a dream for her father, and even he
never went back. Scattering his ashes
at what might have been her ancestor’s eroded
gravestone, the day warm and apt to rain 

any minute, she brought her father’s memory 
back to the land of his grandmother’s tales,
fairies in the field and ruined crops,
the music in her voice still there, faint

and faraway. When the archivist closed 
the musty leatherbound book, she knew
she’d done all she could. The weather
was turning, as it always is in Ireland,

and the wind off the Foyle seemed 
to beckon, its waters choppy
and dark, a hint of salt in the air, 
cloud-light dimming in the west.

Hiking the Burren

As we passed by a backyard garden, into
a copse of hazelnut and ash, birdsong
encircling us in deepening shade—

as we emerged into the sun’’s glare,
pasture rising green against 
the sharp tan of the Burren, I thought 

of hikes we took along the coast 
almost thirty years ago, through 
pine woods emerging into

olive groves and lemon trees,
vineyards along the turquoise waters
of the Mediterranean, and although

the west of Ireland is nothing like
the Ligurian coast, I felt again
that old euphoria rise from 

somewhere in that past, and time
seemed to slow and distance
between the two places collapsed

in a moment’s happiness. Later,
when we returned to Ballyvaughan,
bought a pint of ripe pink

strawberries and ate them in the sun,
the sound of a small folk group
strumming old tunes, a glimpse

of grey waters glinting 
between houses, I remembered 
we were at the end of summer,

rains coming and the cold washing
over us soon enough. We 
would surely see other days 

like this one, the best not lost 
but coming back only
so many times, so that when

they do, we live in them like
the music of finches in a hazelnut
copse, the sight of bare rocky

hills against the sky, the deep green
within us unrolling to the sea.

The Quietest Place

“The full moon was shining upon the broad sea;
I sang to the one star that looked down on me . . .”
              
              —Theodore Roethke, “The Shy Man”

In some quarters, every third business 
is a pub. I sleep on the living room couch
where the street noise doesn’t keep me up

until the wee hours. It’s why I come
to the Special Collections Reading Room,
the quietest place in Galway. Here I feign

a research project, something about Roethke’s
crackup on Inishbofin, its responses
and resonance in Irish poetry and story.

Could I interest an editor on the subject?
I’d rather watch the rain drip from the eaves,
the blue and yellow flowers tossed

in the endless wind, the students 
walking by in their hoods and slickers. 
What they don’t write about

is how six weeks later he returned
calmer from the clinic, no more knife-
wielding tales of Chicago street fights.

Beatrice now back in Seattle, he wrote her
a love poem, made the schoolchildren
laugh with his nonsense lyrics,

played the smiling public man
instead of the mad American poet.
Is that a magpie hopping on the grass?

Or one of those two-toned Irish crows?
Beyond the squat concrete buildings
the river Corrib chugs into town, 
 
its waters darkened by peat,
or so I imagine. In the enveloping
hush of the reading room, I dream 

of a slow hooker cresting and bobbing 
its way to Bofin, the spray blurring 
my vision, salting my tongue. 

I pretend to read. My stomach swims. 
Is that how it was for Roethke, 
returning in rain, the quiet

slowing his voice just enough
to hear it singing into the silence?

David Edelman’s poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Skylight 47 (Ireland), Mudlark: An Electronic Journal of Poetry & Poetics, Freshwater Literary Journal, Seattle Review, RHINO, SLANT, Rio Grande Review, and others. Brooding Heron Press published his chapbook, After the Translation. Originally from Seattle, he and his wife currently reside in Ireland.

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