Josh Widdecombe
‘Who do you think you are?’
Has royal connections
Stretching distant far
Amazing how our forebears
Like tree roots spread abroad
Tell us their stories
Quiet and unheard
My own roots
Great grand parents that’s all
No further back
Nor record to recall
But what I have is story
Imagination can supply
How they lived
Until they came to die
Muinguinane in Erris
A Carey forebear there
And Doolough by the sea
Another Carey spare
Gaughan in Cloontiakilla
Great grandmother I am told
And Deane somewhere along the line
An Erris name and bold
And Slinaun out near Westport
Fahy Loftus ground
Great grandmother Mary Loftus
And Pat Fahy can be found
All her children went from her
Never seen again
Settled in Chicago
That’s a mother’s strain
Granddad came to England
Sister Mary too
One girl left at home
To see the old ones through
Kate she was Kate Nevin
Married in the land
I met her once long time ago
On that ancestral stand
And forebears out in Sligo
Trumble by the name
Was he a Cromwellian soldier
Given land when war’s the game?
A final strand in Monaghan
Tedavnet I believe
A great grandmother O’Hara
Red haired Mary grieve
For she died young in Tyldesley
Her children not yet reared
In cobbled streets she made her home
In a poverty all folk feared
Satanic mills and coalmines
And days spent on the dole
Far from Ireland’s pleasant green
I bless her long lost soul
Such are the folk I come from
I bless them one and all
The peasant folk of Erris
Westport’s lonely stall
The Sligo stem with English name
The girl from Monaghan
This is who I think I am
This my noble clan
Brian Fahy
13 October 2021
Erris Poetry 