I’ll be going down to New York town
to meet my love, my sweet young man,
who has worked so hard to make our home
away across the broad Atlantic. I must
take a step away from friends, from relations,
from my weeping mother, who will never
see me again. My father spits silently in the fire
and I know how he feels.
I am sorry (I am not sorry) for I wish to get away
and live a life away from Ireland, for Ireland
beautiful and grand as it is, truly, crushes
the hearts of its downtrodden women. And I am not
and never will be a downtrodden woman.
I read books, some of which I understand,
and some of which I don’t, but never mind,
I am a proud and nervous nationalist.
Ireland looms out of the darkness.
It sits there, balefully, in the wide Atlantic Sea.
Aviators say, thanks, Christ God, land at last,
a place we can crash or land upon. As did
Alcock and Brown in Clifden in 1919
long before Lucky Lindbergh. It’s there.
Land at last, the farmhouses and the fields,
waiting to welcome or kill you.
Ireland is a place we all want to leave
or stay in forever.
I will take this ship called Titanic.
