ODE TO IRELAND
I’m hoarding me against you, Ireland,
Irish man I married. You’ll have to take
an axe to my hard coat. I want to run
from you, go to Naples or Rome, where
I fit, small tan woman nothing like your
fair freckled femmes. No fairy trees for me,
hazel bush to tie a white rag around, make
a wish, pray to it. Your bog got me once,
mucked my boots, sucked me down.
Your wind nearly knocked me off a cliff.
Your rain trained me to resist, I’m not
giving in now. Not to your splendid cloud
clusters, your extraordinary landscapes,
beet salads or poet men with turquoise shirts
the color of the covers of their books. Oh no,
you can’t feed me with Heaney, Yeats
or Kavanaugh. Not Derek Mahon, John
Fitzgerald, even Evan Boland. I can’t let
myself love you, I’ll dissolve if I do. Like
the first time I kissed a woman, and just
knew. But fastened my mask a little tighter,
after all I had to live in the world I’d made,
sing its safe song. Still do.
Sharon Charde is a retired psychotherapist, writing teacher, and poet, published widely in journals and anthologies, who has won many awards for her poetry, fellowships to MacDowell, Yaddo and Ucross, and has seven Pushcart nominations. She has won first prize for three chapbooks, honorable mention and finalist for two more, and had a full–length collection, Branch in His Hand, made into a radio drama by the BBC and broadcast in 2012. Her memoir I Am Not a Juvenile Delinquent, about her sixteen years volunteering as a poetry teacher at a facility for girls on probation, was published by Mango in 2020.
