Patrick Hart

Happy St. Patrick's Day! It seems appropriate to share the following poem which I wrote back in 1972.

I was walking through St. Dominic's Parish Cemetery just up the road from where my parents lived in Brookfield, Wisconsin, outside of Milwaukee. It was around this time of year as I recall.
The small cemetery is the final resting place for many of the Irish immigrants who settled in this area in the latter half of the 19th century. I discovered two gravestones belonging to Patrick and Mary Hart, from County Sligo, who died in 1871. Between the two monuments was a very small tree barely as high as the stones. This visit inspired the following poem.

Three years ago I revisited the cemetery for the first in over thirty years and found that the small tree had grown into a stately maple. I returned again last weekend and was happy to see that it is still there, right beside Patrick and Mary Hart. I stood there for a moment and listened to the wind.

PATRICK HART

Do you remember the wind?
Watching as it blew ships out to sea
to what awaited them beyond the horizon.
We lived in a small world, just dreams
and the visions of sailing ships.

Remember the wind in Enniscrone?
We looked out over gorse to Killada Bay.
How could such beauty exist
when so many stared outward in hunger?
A bad time - for some it ran out.
We were lucky, you and I –
those sailing ships carried us away.
Do you remember the wind?

Far from Ireland we found new lives
deep in the American heartland. We forgot
the sailing ships and the hunger,
the broken dreams of those left behind,
those who have no memory of the wind.

It now blows through the leaves of a tree
growing beside these marbles stones,
roots clutching at our dust, nourished
by the years we spent in this new land.

Listen to it rustle the leaves.
Do you remember the wind?