"Leave Taking" by Paddy Donoghue.

A lovely melancholy ...

After spending a wonderful Christmas with my parents who traveled over to Texas from Donegal, I’ve been reflecting on one of their Christmas gifts to me – Paddy Donoghue’s debut poetry collection "Leave Taking."

Since my folks have just left to return back home, I’m acutely feeling their absence, but Níl tú i d'aonar (I’m not alone) because missing family after celebrating the holidays is a familiar post-New Year emotion that many Irish emigrants experience throughout the world.

Éamon Ó Caoineachán and his parents.

To ease the transatlantic parting, I picked up Paddy’s book the day after New Year’s. I was captivated by the Atlantic Ocean-blue cover with the half-illuminated, half-shaded photograph of a wave-sculpted grey rock surrounded by sea pebbles.

Paddy expressed that the rock “sits on the shore of the deserted village of Port, in the Parish of Glencolmcille. The rock, shaped by the tides of time, a witness to the lives lost at sea and to those that toiled to survive in this bleak, wild, yet beautiful landscape. Port was the ancestral home on my maternal grandmother’s side. It is a place that has a hold on me.”

The quiet presence of Paddy’s book lay on my writing table, peeking out between the book pile that Santa has a knack of gathering up for me over Christmas time.

I felt resolved to read Paddy’s poems as my New Year’s resolution is to read more contemporary Irish poetry. Paddy lives in my hometown of Bundoran and I’ve fond memories of him as my athletic coach as a boy. I thought, what better way to start the new year on the Gulf Coast than with a book by a local poet from the Donegal coast?

As I leafed through the undulating pages under the breezy canopy of my two live oak trees at Texas twilight – my thumbed-eye caught sight of the opening line from Paddy’s sonnet "Leave Taking" on page 37:

In the lucid light of evening I steal away

to the quiet calmness of an olive grove:

In silence there I pray for leave to stay,

to be loosened from the life I wove,

for the passing years have held much strife.

I found solace imagining the motion matching the emotion of this marvelous line. Maybe it’s because I just ran my favorite trail – the rare remains of a Native American path along Cypress Creek, which reminds me of the lucid light, quiet calmness and silence of the garden around my childhood home in Rathmore.

My thumbed-eye then returned to reread "Leave Taking" due to an acorn dropping down onto the line: “In silence there I pray for leave to stay." Paddy’s poem had unexpectedly made me contemplate a poem that I wrote for my sister's wedding day in 2017, which eventually found a literary home in The Blue Heron Review.

This poem portrays my sister's birth-tree symbolically represented through the whitebeam tree that my parents planted for her in our garden when she was born. The poem also subtly touches on the unjust loss of my family land and childhood home in Rathmore. 

I called the poem "Mono no aware," or, in Irish, "Le himeacht ama."

A lovely melancholy–

the wistful leaves of a cherry blossom


cling to my sister’s birth-tree–

whitebeam in the long wood.

A valediction of leave-taking

and taking leave,


there are teardrops 

at the heart of things.


But, in the kindred cypress shade

of a transatlantic spring


the wedded chess apples will gleam–

blooming en masse


with my white-gold cherry blossom

round your blue-sapphire whitebeam.

One of the signs of good poetry is the way that the poet-speaker’s life can guide the reader to reflect on their own life. Paddy’s poem literally struck home for me, especially after finding out over Christmas that the new owner of my childhood home and family land sadly cut down not only my boyhood trees that I grew up with, but also my sister's birth-tree – I was stunned by how my poem took on a new impactful significance regarding loss. 

Éamon Ó Caoineachán with his siblings in their youth.

However, for some relief – I now write: while the felled trees of our lives can be cut down – while growing branches break, tree trunks chain sawed down, bark stripped bare with lush living leaves falling dead to the grieving ground leaving ripped roots unrooted – there is poetic justice and an empowering presence remembering that loss through poetry because I can see my sister’s whitebeam tree, feel its oval shaped leaves and touch its smooth grooved bark – blooming within my imagination. 

When Paddy shared with his reader about the deserted village of Port having an ancestral hold on him - I realised that the leave taking of the places and people that we lose in our lives can still have a profound hold on our hearts and souls, and for me, that will always be the Keenaghan trees in my childhood garden in Rathmore. 

As I taste the tang of these bittersweet lines – 6,000km away from home – right before running the long wooded Indian trail before anymore of its native yaupon trees are cut down – I hold onto this beautiful leave-taking memory of my sister's whitebeam tree.

Thanks to Paddy’s "Leave Taking" – Cad lionn dubh álainn – what a lovely melancholy. 

*Éamon Ó Caoineachán is a poet and writer, originally from Co Donegal, but now living on the Gulf Coast of Texas. He is currently writing his PhD thesis at Mary Immaculate College in Limerick.