Seán O Muiríosa: Rediscovering My Ancestral Home 🏡

The old house stood as sturdy as ever <br />even as the mangled jade ivy clung and grasped <br />as it had for decades, but she would never be killed. <br />It’s not in her make-up. <br /> <br />A strangely small garden shook me at first <br />until memory kicked in removing all those fears <br />with its usual record of rhetoric: <br />I had not been here now for close on ten years... <br /> <br />Inside a marbled, brown chocolate fireplace greeted us. <br />There was some catching up <br />over mugs a’ tae and sweet crumbly biscuits. <br />A cool chill snapped at my ankles suddenly <br /> <br />from the deep reaches of the old house. <br />But the warmth of almost a century of living <br />fizzled that out into irrelevance <br />like the summer sun on a murky morning fog. <br /> <br />And so then to the Graveyard and the old church of Raheen, <br />I looked down the rolling hills of Laois and <br />I saw my Nan’s childhood home <br />where I had just been. <br /> <br />The duskish green hills arced down and then back up <br />towards the graves, like the curve of a leprechaun shoe. <br />Farms dotted the core of those lovely Laois lowlands, <br />which I thought would go on forever. <br /> <br />Departing, I felt something wrench at me, something <br />from the depths of my silhouette. <br />This is partly where I’ve come from – <br />perhaps some answers at last? <br /> <br />I wanted to stay, to find out, but that’s time <br />doing what it does best, and as it took me home, <br />past dairy fields and barns and branches tatting windows, <br />I let it be, for some other wondrous day.<br /><br />Seán O Muiríosa<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-journey-to-my-roots/