Irish Channel: A poem by George Guida

Irish Channel

These canals overflow with bones.

They flow slow and lazy as praise

of family gods at dinner.

My father, dying now, lived

on such a course, with his voweled name,

throwing childhood pebbles in.

The exotic diseases died in veins

of men named McBain and MacGrath,

with the death of certain anopheles.

My father’s welts were a simple itch

to claim the soil dug by migrants,

like his own, but from higher latitudes.

They came on boats, escaping land,

escaping good earth mulcted

by consonanted gentry and voweled.

The princes relied on bias and fear

less than skin, and on letters’ mystery

across alphabets and centuries.

Canals overflow with words that name

the bones of men inflected and drowned,

buried in silt and discovered in time.

We nameless haul them up and tap

for sounds like ours, returning

unfamiliar phonemes to the murk.