When
I was a boy growing up in an Irish immigrant household in the Bronx, March 17th
was second only to December 25th in its potent mix of religion, magic, and
celebration. We'd wait for the air-mail
letter from our relatives in Galway to arrive and we'd carefully remove from it
the little sprig of shamrock plucked from the soil of Holy Ireland and shaken
free in the Bronx. We'd go to mass in the morning, with everyone singing the
beautiful hymn, "Hail Glorious St. Patrick" [click on the title to hear the late Frank Patterson's version]. And, as a member of the Ancient Order of
Hibernians All-Accordion Band, along with my father and brother Jimmy (now Jesse), we would
march up 5th Avenue in the St. Patrick's Day Parade, something I did 11 years
in a row. Post-parade, the underage drinking and wilding became part of one's
Irish adolescence in New York. [photo above: AOH All-Accordion band,
ca. 1955; Terence Winch, front row, far right; Jesse Winch, 3rd from right]
The
parade began in this country as an assertion of Irish identity and the growing
political power of Ireland's immigrants. In contrast, until
recent decades, March 17th in Ireland itself was much more a religious holiday.
[below: New
York City's parade, 1871. A float featuring a bust of Daniel O'Connell passes
through Union Square. The first recorded St. Patrick's Day parade was held in
Boston, in 1737. New York was the second
city to embrace the annual march, beginning in 1762.]
I
wrote the poem below on the street, using a mailbox for a desk, on the way to a
St. Paddy's Day gig with my band, Celtic Thunder, in the late 1990s.
P R A Y E R T O S
T. P A T R I C K
Brit, forgive
us our sins, our wins, our
losses,
forgive us our employees
and bosses,
forgive us those stupid
four-leaf clovers
that idiots confuse with
the Holy Trinity-signifying
shamrock, especially
around this time of year.
Forgive us green beer,
Hostess cupcakes with green
icing, forgive us the
moronic greening
of hair, food, water. Forgive us the total
lack of meaning that now
attaches to your name.
It is all truly unseemly
and insane.
Grant us a moratorium on
any more news of
the triumphs of Michael Flatley or Frank McCourt.
God bless Paddy’s pig and
Paddy Moloney’s wig,
Mickey and Andy Rooney,
Rosemary and George Clooney.
Requiescat in pace,
Versace et Liberace.
In nomine Dei, we’ve had
enough of Leahy.
Dear saint of our isle,
we’d like to send ya
an urgent plea to abolish
Enya.
Let the bar owners pay
the poor musicians
a small fortune.
They’re earning it.
Banish misfortune for the
Irish
over here and the Irish
over there.
Banish “Danny Boy” and
“The Unicorn”
while you’re at it.
Let there be an
Irish-American fin de siècle
starring Mark McGwire and
Margaret Heckler.
Grant another eighty-seven
years to my Auntie Nora
and let history smile upon
the Irish Diaspora.
Let the music be on the
mark.
Lead the fiddle players
from the dark
of orthodoxy. Oremus for
my brother Seamus.
Let a thousand poems and
songs
end the battles and undo
the wrongs.
[This poem
first appeared in Irish Music magazine (March 2000) and later in my book, Boy
Drinkers.]
Equally irreverent is a well-known song, written by Henry
Bennett in the 1820s:
St. Patrick Was A Gentleman
Built the church in Dublin town, and on it put a steeple
His father was a Gallagher, his mother was a Brady
His aunt was an O'Shaughnessy, his uncle was a Grady
The Wicklow hills
are very high, and so's the Hill of Howth, sir
But there's a hill
much higher still, much higher than them both, sir
On the top of this
high hill St. Patrick preached his sermon
Which drove the
frogs into the bogs and banished all the vermin
There's not a mile of Erin's isle where dirty vermin musters
But there he put his dear fore-foot and murdered them in
clusters
The frogs went hop and the toads went pop slapdash into the
water
And the snakes committed suicide to save themselves from
slaughter
Nine hundred
thousand reptiles blue he charmed with sweet discourses
And dined on them
in Killaloe on soups and second courses
Where blind worms
crawling in the grass disgusted all the nation
Right down to hell
with a holy spell he changed their situation
No wonder that them Irish lads should be so gay and frisky
Sure St. Pat he taught them that as well as making whiskey
No wonder that the saint himself should understand
distilling
For his mother kept a shebeen shop in the town of
Enniskillen
Was I but so
fortunate as to be back in Munster
I'd be bound that
from that ground I never more would once stir
There St. Patrick
planted turf and cabbages and praties
Pigs galore, mo
gra/, mo sto/r, altar boys and ladies.
But St. Patrick (385─461 AD), all irreverence aside,
really deserves to live on in our collective memory. In his brilliant 1995 best-seller, How the Irish Saved Civilization, Thomas Cahill writes with eloquent insight and
feeling about Patrick, really giving the man a human shape. Patrick "…worries constantly for his
people, not just for their spiritual but for their physical welfare. The horror
of slavery was never lost on him [Patrick had been a slave himself for six years]: 'But
it is the women kept in slavery who suffer the most—and who keep their spirits
up despite the menacing and terrorizing they must endure. The Lord gives grace
to his many handmaids; and though they are forbidden to do so, they follow him
with backbone.'" A primal
feminist! Cahill goes on: "…the
greatness of Patrick is beyond dispute: the first human being in the history of
the world to speak out unequivocally against slavery. Nor will any voice as
strong as his be heard again till the seventeenth century." He's earned his parade.
Statue of St. Patrick at Leaba Padriag (St.
Patrick's Bed) in Connemara (Galway).