On Mourning

 The streets of Chicago are rife with the verdant jubilation of St. Patrick's Day. And yet, we are still, gazing at the skyline, our faces wet with tears for Bannow Strand.  

If only...if only we could join them.

The bar at the corner is filled with celebratory voices. Yet we struggle to lift our steins of Clanconnel Brewery's McGrath's Irish Red,  remembering those slain on May 1, 1169.

The screams filling County Wexford. The blood of a child on Diamait MacMurrough's axe. The island shores littered with Cambro-Norman ships.

Is it our inability to make amends with the past that chains us to this feeling of solitude? That severs us from the carousing crowd? Or is it the guilt inside our souls, burrowing deeper and deeper, falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of Bannow Strand into the soil which bore it?