Happy St. Patrick's Day!!!

Eamon Patrick's Poem

Hard to believe it has been 29-years since I wrote “Eamon Patrick’s Poem” when he was a fetus inside his mother’s womb. It has been published in Paris but this is the first time it appears in the U.S. Hope it makes your St. Patrick’s Day a little brighter.

And for any of our grown and married American children hesitating about whether they should have children due to finances, we were in no position financially to have Eamon 29 years ago. But God provides and your children and grandchildren are the greatest blessing in life you will ever know if you have faith in God and co-create them with Him.

Josh is the older one on guitar. He has a beautiful wife and has blessed me with two grandchildren. Eamon is on violin…still single, unfortunately. Both were trained as mechanical engineers but make their living as sound and vibration engineers.

Eamon Patrick's Poem

Kicking your mother

from inside the liquid

universe of the womb

I feel so crippled

and broken

when considering

I have so much to teach you

and only the remaining

lifetime to do so.

It is hopeless, really,

except these two gems

that came down from a long, long,

line of men and women who survived

centuries of Viking invasions

whose barbarity was only surpassed

by the neighbor invader

who considered genocide

by the rule of law

such a jolly good adventure

and stole all the food

in the very middle

of the famine of all famines.

Through it all,

your ancestors survived

tenaciously creative

and green as moss

on the back of a stone

on the gentle Shannon River

and these two gems skip across

that great river to the Delaware

where once, when wondering

of ancestral roots I asked my father,

“Dad, what is it to be American?”

“Work.” “What?” I asked.

“Work.” he repeated.

“Your grandfather worked.

I worked. You’ll work.”

“That’s all?” “That’s all.” he answered.

“Then what is it to be Irish?”

“Hilarity.” He didn’t miss a beat again.

“Hilarity. You gotta make ‘em laugh.”

So, there it is Eamon Patrick.

If God takes me

before I get to teach you

all you need to know,

let these two words suffice:

work and hilarity.

Work and hilarity

saved your people

over centuries of warfare, pestilence,

invasion, slavery, defeat, and famine

and eventually defeated

the greatest power on earth

so that I could write you this poem.

Work and hilarity

can carry you to the universe

and to the other planets

and when you find

a particularly hard planet,

name it “Work,”

And when you find

an especially funny planet,

name it “Hilarity.”

No matter what the planet or year,

work and hilarity are in your genes

as am I, and all of my dreams.

Germantown, MD

February 10, 1996

Eamon’s Poem was first published in Paris in 2000