Going Home to County Clare
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And some time make the time to drive out westInto County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,In September or October, when the windAnd the light are working off each otherSo that the ocean on one side is wildWith foam and glitter, and inland among stonesThe surface of a slate-grey lake is litBy the earthed lightening of flock of swans,Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,Their fully-grown headstrong-looking headsTucked or cresting or busy underwater.Useless to think you'll park or capture itMore thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,A hurry through which known and strange things passAs big soft buffetings come at the car sidewaysAnd catch the heart off guard and blow it open-Seamus Heaney, Postscript
I wrote two weeks ago that I'd have to delay blogging about my trip to Carrowduff, Co. Clare; that was because I was at work on a longer travel memoir, published today on CNN. In it, I talk about my own journey, about County Clare in 2014, and about the challenges to the American sons and daughters of immigrant parents who left them with a few stories, a few pictures, and little else with which to shore up their vague cultural inheritances.
Like so many American descendants of 19th and early 20th century immigrants, I have no family albums tracing my lineage back to New England ships, to British houses or German hamlets echoing back my own surname; the portraits in my parents' dining room -- a long nose here, familiar deep-set eyes there -- are to an unsettling degree nameless. ...
Read more on CNN.com. You can also see my photos from Ireland here.
