A Poet's Journey: Notes on Poetry and What it Means to be a Poet (8)

A Poet's Journey: on poetry and what it means to be a poet, 
Ekstasis Editions, 2019

As a woman animates and brings to life a man’s potential, CZ has animated me to live more fully and deeply. She is a person of compassion and intelligence who has helped many people, including myself, fulfill their talent and destiny. She is a brilliant poet who has also worked as an editor and publisher. We have been together since we met in June, 1991; she brought love into my life and gave me a new and fuller life. I love her dearly and my life revolves around her. She is my life partner, my creative partner, my friend and partner in family affairs. All of my life I had wanted to find someone like her, and I thank God that I did find her.
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Family history is a quest that can take up years of one’s life, but eventually it returns us to our own life, more fulfilled and with a deeper appreciation of life. You don’t necessarily go on a quest knowing you are on one; it is something that gradually preoccupies much of one’s time. My quest was to find my ancestors, to list them genealogically, and to find information about them: who they are, their dates of birth and death, where they lived, and some facts about their lives. Writing poetry is not a quest, it is a calling; family history has been a quest.
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When I was a child I knew, intuitively, that the stories I heard my relatives tell about the family were important. I felt there was heroism to life, not the traditional heroism and bravery of the battlefield, but heroism involved in everyday life by everyday people. I felt that there was something of importance to remembering the past. I recorded the stories I heard about my relatives and ancestors. Even as a child I always felt that the real heroes of everyday life were average people, the ones who survive and who go about their lives with dignity. It is the ordinary people among us who I found to be of great interest.
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I often think about the ancestors. I work through all the generations of my family, beginning with the first family members to move to Montreal. My great great grandfather, Laurence Morrissey, moved from Ireland to New Brunswick, Canada in 1837 in the company of his parents (my great great great grandparents Patrick Morrissy and Mary Phelan) and his six siblings: John, Michael, Mary, and Patrick who were all older than Laurence, and Catherine, the youngest of the children. The whole family uprooted themselves from where they lived, possibly in Mullinahone, County Tipperary, and moved as a group to Canada. Patrick, Laurence’s father, was a saddler by profession and not a young man when he moved here; he may have been as old as fifty years. What caused them to move, whether by necessity or the desire to improve the material prospects of the family, isn’t known. I believe Laurence married within months of arriving in New Brunswick and a few years later he and his wife, Johannah Meany and their son, or perhaps two sons, moved to Montreal.
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I honour and respect the ancestors by remembering them. I am in a direct line of ancestors according to family dates of birth and death. I was born just days before the first day of the Celtic season of Beltane, on May 1st, which for the Celts was the first day of summer. Beltane, with Samhain, winter, is the time when the Otherworld is closest to our material world. Samhain, which begins on November 1st, is the first day of winter for the Celts, and is a time when the days grow shorter and the fabric between the material world and the world of the ancestors and spirit is at its thinnest. This is when the ancestors communicate with us the most, whether it is in dreams, or their physical presence.
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One November night I sat in a restaurant with some friends. After we ate a band played music. While the others listened I was filled with deeply moving memories of my father and later that night wrote a poem about the final days of his life, of his journey to a hospital in Boston where he died a few weeks later. The next day I discovered it was the forty-seventh anniversary of my father’s death. The ancestors visit us if we listen to them. On many occasions I have walked on the street and felt the presence of ancestors walking with me; I have felt them pressing against me when they have numbered in the hundreds.
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The work of writing poems, honouring the ancestors, the work of healing in poetry, all of this is given to me. I have really been very passive in life. My life was given to me, it was presented to me as a mission in which I am sometimes little more than an observer of what happens. This is the work that was given to me: writing poems, honouring the ancestors, giving time, care, and love to my family, and loving God.
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I love all of the ancestors, no matter how elevated or how lowly their social position when they were alive. Some of the ancestors are a daily presence in my life, as though they were physically present. I believe I have a connection, extending across my whole life, with the ancestors. I loved my grandmother, Edith Sweeney, who died one month short of her ninetieth birthday, on April 23, 1965, and who was buried the day before my fifteenth birthday in April 1965. My great grandmother, Mary Callaghan was born on my mother’s birthday, March 1st, and died in 1906 on my birthday, April 27. Mary Callaghan’s father died on my birthday, in 1905. My great great grandmother, Johannah Meany, died on April 26th, 1880. Her husband, my great great grandfather Laurence Morrissey, married Marie Emma Mercier, a year to the day after Johannah’s funeral, on April 29, 1881. Out of all the dozens of dates of family members’ births and deaths that I have recorded, these are some of the people I feel are the closest to me in my family history, all are in a direct line of family ancestors. I have in my own way and to the best of my ability honoured seven generations of family members.
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