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Mama Mada
The Finest Specimen
by Jane Clark e
When I was a child my father wrote the twelve fair days
of Roscommon on the back of a Players pack
and taught me to recite them as farmers used to do.
He showed me where the blacksmith had inscribed
1865 on a gate – the year Yeats was born, he’d say.
There’s one date you have to remember, your great
great great grandfather, the one with the whiskers,
was born the year of the rebellion, 1798,
any family history before that is just imagination.
He showed me a bible with miniature print
on gossamer paper which he touched as if it were
pure gold. This was yo ur great-grandmother’s,
published the year of the Act of Union. He told me
old stories as if he’d lived through them.
When the turlough froze in 1816,
three neighbours walked the ice with sacks of oats
on a short-cut home from the mill; one fell into a gap,
the other two drowned trying to save him. Some stories
he seldom told, how as a boarder in Blackhall Place
he slept with his feet pointing west or how he
and my mother returned early from honeymoon
because he was lonely for the fields. Yesterday
he took out old letters, bound together with knotted string;
my brother’s first letter home, another from a neighbour
thanking my grandfather for a loan and the letter
from his grandmother to her sister on the morning
of his birth, the second last day of March, 1929.
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