My mother has always loved poetry. There was a section on her bookshelves for Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, e.e. cummings, Marge Piercy, all her favorites. After she discovered her birth mother was born in Ireland, her shelves became more Irish, and she added the weight of the Irish poets.
In her early fifties, with her Irish fixation unabated, she got her master’s in Irish Studies from Boston College. I have boxes and boxes of her course work, research, and papers she gave at various Irish conferences.
She became fascinated with John Montague and wrote a paper on his fraught relationship with his mother to be delivered at one of these conferences. A few weeks before, her mother died, the one who raised her. It was a brutal, violent, and sudden death. Most people only knew that it was sudden. She could have ducked out of giving the paper at the conference, but Mom soldiers on.
She held back tears as she presented, but made it through. Afterwards, as she walked away from the podium, the great Seamus Heaney approached her. I heard about your mother, he said. You were very brave to do that. He enfolded her in a hug. Then he told her he’d known John Montague, and that she’d done a wonderful job of explaining his work.
This sustained her. She’d felt guilt looking for her birth mother, researching her life, falling in love with Ireland. She’d never told her actual mother about it, the one she’d grown up with. She knew it would break her mother’s heart. She’d worried at some level that giving this paper was a betrayal, so soon after her mother’s heart really broke.
Seamus Heaney held her and told her it was okay. That meant everything.
Sometimes I read Seamus Heaney poems to her now. She still appreciates the imagery, and reacts with strong emotion to anything dark or sad. Each line is gone to her a moment after it is spoken, so each image stands independent of the next. There are no complete poems for her anymore, only one line and then the next. She still loves those lines.
VIDEO OF ME READING POETRY BELOW
