Shelter Island Reporter Poetry Corner: ‘Emigrants’

For Peter Quinn

One hundred thirty now,

the lingering years gone

since my Moran fled

the pathetic coast

of Mayo, longing toward

some imagined redress.

Today, faces so like

my own, familiar as

whistle and harp notes,

ask, “Have you been?”

and “When will you get

home again?”

Sadly, I cannot say except,

I know I will be there soon.

And when I am, at last, I will

bend to kiss that ground

softly like the forehead

of an aging mother,

Shake hands with a thousand

cousins, listen for the poems

trapped in hill and bog.

I might cast a slackline

for a silver rainbow, smell

the grass at the chapel wall.

Standing before the cliffs,

I’ll raise a warm pint of ebony

and foam, and face myself into

the bite of the briny breeze.

To the memory of all my dead,

I’ll call out to the back of the sky,

Allowing my blue eyes to moisten

with the pains of the leaving.

I’ll recite in tender meter every regret,

and wonder from the bare heights

of the lonesome Connacht shores,

at how it was the wind had

carried us so very far away.

Daniel Patrick Moran, a former resident of Shelter Island, and a former Poet Laureate of Suffolk County, has written more than a dozen volumes of poetry.