Going Home to a Place You've Never Been

March 15, 2021

Dear Subscriber:

Each week we examine a theme from a variety of points of view. The theme for this week is St. Patrick’s Day, which is celebrated on March 17.

I welcome comments on my poems at https://nicholasgordon.blogspot.com.

A St. Patrick’s Day poem about the emotional return to Ireland of the child of Irish immigrants:

Going home to a place you've never been,
To long-loved landscapes that you've never seen,
To where your soul was sculpted by a wind
Your parents' parents left still young behind.

How long do such ancestral memories last?
When, if ever, can the past be past?
You do not know, but only know right now
This place has gripped your heart like home somehow.

Your plane descends above green hills where once
Your people for millennia learned to dance
The dance you learned third hand, yet dancing still,
You land, weeping hard against your will.

© by Nicholas Gordon

To see this poem on my site, go to https://www.poemsforfree.com/goingh.html. For more St. Patrick’s Day poems, go to https://www.poemsforfree.com/stpatricksdaypoems.html.

This week’s theme: St. Patrick’s Day.
March 15: Going Home to a Place You’ve Never Been