This is Poetry Moment on WPSU – a weekly program featuring the work of contemporary Pennsylvania poets. Your host is poet and author Marjorie Maddox, a 2023 Monson Arts Fellow, author of more than 20 books, and Professor Emerita of English and creative writing at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University.
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Welcome to Poetry Moment.
Happy Saint Patrick’s Day! If you be even a wee bit Irish—or find yourself, on this St. Patrick’s Day, enamored of “stone-scattered fields” and “darkened pubs”—raise a pint to today’s poem, “Meaning to Be Irish,” by Elaine Terranova.
Elaine Terranova was born in Philadelphia, where she still lives. She has taught at the Community College of Philadelphia and Temple University. She has a memoir, The Diamond Cutter’s Daughter, and ten books of poetry, including The Cult of The Right Hand, which was chosen by Rita Dove as the winner of the Walt Whitman Award. Additional awards include a Pushcart Prize, PA, NEA and Pew Fellowships, and the Maurice English Award.
There’s something about St. Paddy’s Day that turns even the non-Irish, Irish. If you throw in a soulful rendition of “Oh Danny Boy” and a traditional step dance, some of us will be ready to pack our bags and leg it to the Emerald Isle. In today’s calm, lush poem, “Meaning to Be Irish,” Elaine Terranova’s fierce love of Ireland is beautifully contagious.
Here’s “Meaning to be Irish” by Elaine Terranova
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I have been meaning to be Irish, to walk
in stone-scattered fields where a sheepdog follows
like a friend. To wait just behind the door
of warm afternoons, allowing the sun to alternate
with soft rains until it is pleasant to go out
or bravely, step over the shiny doorstep anyway
just as a mackerel sky swells into view, so large
I can’t hold all of it in my eyes at once.
I have been meaning to tilt my voice so it tips
toward a brogue. To surrender my senses
to loam and green undulations and peat bogs.
To down a pint by the fire of a darkened pub at five
with mates just comfortably tipsy as I am.
I wish there were a poem in my head that I might
scratch out in a notebook lying open on the scuffed desk
of a near-dark room, lightened only with the flecks
of moths escaping as I open my chiffonier.
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Meaning to Be Irish” was in Terranova's most recent book, Rinse (Boston: Grid Books, 2023).
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That was “Meaning to Be Irish” by Elaine Terranova. Thanks for listening.
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Listen for Poetry Moment with Marjorie Maddox Mondays during Morning Edition and All Things Considered on WPSU. You can more episodes at wpsu.org/poetrymoment.
Our theme music is by Eric Ian Farmer.
