She’s a wild flower of Drumilra
But she’s also German too
She comes from Philadelphia
Now have you got a clue?
She was a star of the silver screen
Then a princess fair
Beautiful and gracious
Kind and debonair
Visiting ancestral roots
In a townland in Mayo
Enjoying tea and soda bread
A change from Monaco
She bought the place eventually
Plans to build a home
But a stroke and then the car crash
Wrote the last page of the tome
The folk around Drumilra
Gathered wild flowers to send
To grace the chapel for the mass
For Grace for that sad end
How fitting that the flowers
That bloom in Mayo air
Should grace her funeral in the end
Love’s token and love’s care
Brian Fahy
9 January 2022
+ Grace Kelly visited Newport and Drumilra in 1961,1976 and 1979. She visited the old lady in the cottage in 1961 and then again in the McBride Home in Westport in 1976. She then bought the cottage with a view to building a new place there. Grace Kelly died in 1982, having suffered a stroke and then losing control of her car and plunging off the road. She was 52 years of age.
Erris Poetry 