On Sunday afternoons at three,
my grandmother could finally sit down,
cradle her sturdy mug of tea on her lap,
huddle alone beside the kitchen radio.
The lilt of wood flutes and tin whistles
transported her to Galway’s far shores
where she’d never lived, but longed to be—
green fields, green hills, green valleys.
What did she recall of her one trip across,
a girl, just six, clutching her mother’s hand?
Were Uilleann pipes rousing a wedding march;
red-eyed mourners keening at a family grave?
The radio program was her weekly solace,
dulcet tones to lift her blue Irish heart.
Jane Attanucci has poems published in Halfway Down the Stairs, Off the Coast, The Quotable and Right Hand Pointing, among others, and forthcoming in the Pittsburgh Poetry Review. Her chapbook, First Mud, (finalist in the Blast Furnace Contest, 2014) was released by Finishing Line Press (2015). She lives in Cambridge, Mass.
© 2013, Jane Attanucci
Halfway Down the Stairs 