Super-sized Series

 Happy St. Patrick’s Day 

 

 

 

Two poems by Sharon Waller Knutson

On St. Paddy’s Day

As a child, I always
wore green to school,
so I wouldn’t get pinched,
believed in leprechauns,
looked for a pot of gold
under every rainbow
and tossed horseshoes
over my shoulder
hoping for good luck.

In my twenties, I pinned
a shamrock to the collar
of my green dress,
passed as Irish because
I had my mother’s red
hair and Pond’s cold
cream complexion,
danced the Irish jig with guys
in green shirts and hats
and cooked corn beef
brisket, cabbage and carrots.

This St. Paddy’s Day,

I look through my closet
for my only piece of clothing
that is green – A Lucky 8
Grandma T-shirt I bought
years ago. I will drink
iced tea and eat shrimp
salad since I gave up
beer and brisket years ago.
My great grandchildren
leap like leprechauns
in my life via video chats
and I still look for that pot
of gold under every rainbow.

 

 

 Grandma T shirt, shrimp salad and iced tea


My Mother Loves Green

apples, asparagus, avocados,
freshly mowed grass
and sculptured shrubs.

Cabbage cooked with corned beef,
lime Jell-O shaped like a shamrock
and us. On St. Paddy’s Day,

ten days before I turn sixteen,
my father in his jade jacket,
my sister in chartreuse tights,

holding the emerald-eyed cat,
mother in a fern green muumuu
and me with moss colored hair,

stand under a Ponderosa Pine,
smiling and squinting
as the flashbulb goes off.

The photo in the album
is black and white.
But I remember it in color.

 

patrick's shamrock green by j.lewis

i've been there, you know?
walked along paths where he
allegedly trod as he brooded over
the task of turning pagans
(of which there were many
in fifth-century Ireland)
into christians, one and all

he wasn't much for green garb
sporting instead robes of blue
but the imputed use of the shamrock
to make a religious point
well, that was later too convenient
to ever pass up, and ireland
being the essence of greenery
cemented the association
several centuries later

it's fitting, i guess, that parades,
parties, and pints of beer came
not from eire, just as patrick
was not born there, but from
the diaspora, longing for home
for identity, for hope.

me? i'm neither irish nor catholic
nor superstitious nor conformist
which is the reason that every march
on the seventeenth day, school meant
i was pinched and punched and prodded
because i refused to wear the shamrock green
st. patrick indeed. i'd sooner have
a leprechaun or a snake for a friend

 

 

 

At the St. Patrick's Day Parade by Rachael Ikins

Did ya see her ridin' past,
on her green bicycle,
starkers this cold bright day?

Green cap sayin' " Lucky!"
Shamrocks and ladybird beetles
Circlin' her right wrist.

Green argyle socks, matchin' purse
Strap dividin' her boobies.

Is the woman ravin' mad then?
Tis freezin out! Yah. Her bum-cheeks
Was bright pink I heard.

Standing on pedals.
Meaning no disrespect to sainted Padraig,
she honors the woman he loved and left
for God. Wild Celtic witch,
bareback on her pony,

tangled dark curls flying on the wind.
This bike-riding, red-cheeked woman
honors love.

For sure, God matters.
But a woman's warm breath against your neck
on a winter night, when you see only darkness,
you feel her heartbeat through her breasts into
your shoulder blades, a pounding message.

I wish Padraig had kept her and God.
The legends are heartbreakers, almost
too sad to read to the end.
Sometimes you just want the hero
to get the girl.

 

 

 

 Irish Eyes by Joan Leotta

Looking into my brown eyes
In the mirror this morning
I smile, happy because
both eyes are functioning.
after recently being
slit open by a surgeon
in a surgery most consider
ordinary but which, due to
an inherited condition
under a less skilled knife
could have left me blind.

My surgeon expressed surprise
that I someone so very Italian,
suffered this Celtic-DNA condition.
I told him, laughing at my fate,
“all of Italy is a port and
 Roman soldiers roamed
far afield to Ireland, Scotland.”

Healing, especially
in that left eye
is moving very slowly
with the aid of drops
hours spent sitting still,
and thinking
good thoughts on this
tiny bit of Ireland that
resides in my brown eyes.

It makes me want to use them
to visit the Emerald Isle and
explains why in spite of
the plethora of Irish girls
wearing the blue serge of my
Catholic school, I was the one
I of olive skin and dark
Brown eyes chosen to
write the  annual St. Pat’s
play, lead the singing of Irish
folksongs and even
taking part in the onstage Irish jig!.