Poem

Homeland

from Homeland

In 1802 Patrick Prunty left his homeland at Rathfriland, Co. Down, for St. John’s College, Cambridge, to study Theology. In 1804 he returned to Rathfriland to preach in the local church. Later he moved to Haworth, Yorkshire. By then he had changed his surname to Brontë.

Patrick’s grandfather, ‘Welsh’, was adopted - having been found as an orphan on a boat coming to Ireland from Liverpool. Welsh later evicted the family that adopted him and married his ‘sister’. Some biographers have noted how much the story of Welsh resembles the back-story of Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff.


1. The Church

This is where it begins, at Drumballyroney church
where the gothic tombstones are grassed-over or wind-worn.
The father was born here. That second birth in which a voice
is finally unleashed to become its rich unmoored self.
Now a bone-grey building with amenities, pictures from Jane Eyre,
it stands facing the Mournes, a panorama of blue granite
like an orbit of planets, with Slieve Donard the North Star.
Here the sky is all upwards and out. I imagine his life under this sky
with its sense of chainlessness, half in the realm of flight
and wonder if this bright hill forms also his daughters’ legacy.
Preaching for the last time here, in a low-roofed wooden womb,
he’d have looked coldly on the small fields of Ballynaskeagh and Glascar
before leaving for England and a new name. With him the weight
of the family secret: Heathcliff, his paradoxical love of light.



Note
This poem is the first in a series of five that cover the five points of the Brontë Homeland Drive at Banbridge. The next poem concerns the school where Patrick taught before leaving for Cambridge.

Jacqueline McCarrick
County Louth, Ireland

A graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, I live in the borderland region of Ireland. My first play, The Mushroom Pickers, won the 2005 SCDA National Playwriting Competition, and premiered at the Southwark Playhouse in London in May 2006, and in New York in February 2009. I have published poetry and prose.

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