Happy St Patrick's Day

Yesterday we celebrated both St Patrick's Day (a day early) and my mom's birthday (a few days late) because that is what happens when everyone's kids are in school and things must happen on weekends.  But today is St Patrick's day, and as I have mentioned before my grandmother's birthday.   So in honor of her, a lot of other ancestors, and the day, here is my second annual collection of music and quotes from some notable persons of Irish ancestry.

Yet I am charmed

by the hills behind Dublin

those white stone cottages,

grass green as no other green is green,

my mother's peoples, their ways.

(Brian Coffey)

"I am of Ireland

And the Holy Land of Ireland,

and time runs on," cried she.

"Come out of charity

Come dance with me in Ireland."

(W.B. Yeats, traanslation of

early English Poem)

From "The Triads of Ireland"

(9th cent Gaelic translated by Kuno Meyer)

Three things betokening trouble:

Holding plough-land in common;

performing feats together;

alliance in marriage.

Three candles that illuminate every darkness:

truth, nature, knowledge,

Three things that ruin wisdom:

ignorance, inaccurate knowledge, forgetfullness.

The Irish say your trouble is their trouble

and your joy their joy?

I wish I could believe it;

I'm troubled, I'm discontented, I'm Irish.

(Marriane Moore)

Out of Ireland have we come

Great hatred, little room

Maimed us from the start.

I carry from my mother's womb

A fanatic heart.

(W.B. Yeats)

History says, Don't hope

on this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

the longed for tidal wave

of justice can rise up,

and hope and history rhyme.

(Seamus Heaney)