Prayer to Saint Patrick [Terence Patrick Winch]

 

photo above: AOH All-Accordion band, ca. 1955; Terence Winch, front row, far right; Jesse Winch, 3rd from right; Felix Dolan, 2^nd from left; for a history of the band, with most members in this photo identified, see Hugh O’Rourke’s NY Irish History Journal article.

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." And, as a member of the Ancient Order of Hibernians Division 9 All-Accordion Band, along with my father and brother 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. The parade began in this country as an assertion of Irish identity and growing political power. In Ireland, until recent decades, March 17th was much more a religious holiday.

I wrote the poem below on the street, using a mailbox for a desk, on the way to a gig with my band, Celtic Thunder, in the late 1990s, when the 21^st century was very near but still seemed an unreal prospect. 

Prayer to St. Patrick

St. Patrick, snake-hating 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.

“Prayer to St. Patrick” first appeared in Irish Music magazine (March 2000) and later in my book, Boy Drinkers.  I should note that Margaret Heckler, who served as Health and Human Services Secretary under Ronald Reagan, was born Margaret Mary O'Shaughnessy.

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Equally irreverent is a well-known song, written by Henry Bennett in the 1820s:

St. Patrick Was A Gentleman

Patrick was a gentleman, came from decent people

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 grá, mo stór, altar boys and ladies.

 "Saint Patrick Was a Gentleman,” sung by Christy Moore, with Stockton’s Wing, live at the Abbey Tavern, Dublin, 1980)  

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The pilgrimage spot of Mám Éan, in Connemara, county Galway, which is dedicated to St. Patrick. Photo by Eilish O'Shea

But St. Patrick (385--461 AD), all irreverence aside, really deserves to live on in our collective memory. In How the Irish Saved Civilization, his brilliant 1995 best-seller, 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 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.

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. 

An earlier version of this post appeared on the Best American Poetry blog on March 15, 2010. 

 ©Terence Winch  
Permission required to use any of the contents of this post.