We love to be in places
Where our loved ones have been before
It feels a lot like touching them
In touch with days of yore
It’s like a relic or a souvenir
A secret lock of hair
An item blessed by closeness
To the one who is not there
I often think of Slinaun
That little cottage there
And the children of that family
Who left for life elsewhere
My grandfather to England
To work hard down the mine
Three sisters to Chicago
Beside Lake Michigan
My mother’s home in Erris
A place that we know best
All our family holidays
Happy in the west
To be inside the schoolhouse
Where mammy first learned rhyme
Excelled in Irish language
And Alice Milligan
And suddenly it occurs to me
Another crossing place
My father near Jerusalem
North Africa to face
Passed by the very area
Where his uncle Owen died
In the war that went before
Where a sniper’s bullet fired
How strange then that their paths should cross
All dutiful in war
Here Owen died now you go on
I’ll watch you from afar
And you get home to Tyldesley
And tell them when you do
We tried our best our John and I
And we did it all for you
Brian Fahy
3 January 2022
+ Two of my father’s uncles, John Trumble and Owen Trumble, died in the First World War. John was killed in May 1916 in France.
Owen was killed south of Jerusalem on 26th December 1917. He had crept out into ‘no man’s land’ to try and rescue a wounded soldier when he was killed by a sniper’s bullet.
My father must have passed by very near to that place on his way to North Africa to join the Desert Rats as they fought against Rommel.
Erris Poetry 