Father John McNamee's Poem, "Homecoming," from "Donegal Suite"
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"This is the first poem in the book,” explains Father John McNamee, “and it’s about coming back from the Giant’s Causeway on a windswept, rainy afternoon, and going into a bar where there were old men sitting around a fire. It was like a home I was visiting for the first time. My father came not far from that area, and I grew up with a lot of Irish people around me. So when I hear an Irish brogue—in the north it bears a closer resemblance to a Scots’ brogue, it recreates my own childhood.”
Homecoming
Earth and sea and air might mean nothing more
than elements around us, a stage where our self-
contained bodies move and maneuver.
What I know is that one wild afternoon on
the Giant’s Causeway in Country Antrim
wind and salt-spray, the smell of kelp and a
walk on wet lichen-covered basalt columns
was home as never elsewhere am I home.
My long-dead father’s place not fifty
kilometers south. He, Scots and Irish, and
if sight could pierce the horizontal rain, there
the Mull of Kintyre north across the water.
Tousled and wet, I returned to an inn
back from the headland where the smell
of tobacco on damp wool mixed with
the odors brought from their farms by
old men gathered with pints around a fireplace.
A home I was visiting for the first time.
Reprinted with permission of the author
Related Links
St. Malachy Church Web Site
McNamee Interview
St. Malachy's Irish History
Concert Story and Photos
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