Barbara J. Hamby

Atta Girl

In the last month I’ve received a couple of nice compliments for my poetry. On October 15th, Kurt Kristensen of Poetspeak, posted my poem “Musicale” on the Poetspeak blog at:  http://poetspeakusa.blogspot.com/

Yesterday a retired writing teacher, a fellow student in my Portland Community College writing class, asked for a copy of a poem I wrote about a trip to Ireland to use as a teaching tool illustrating alliteration.

The timing could not be better. With worrisome things going on in my life, these “attagirls” really make me feel great.

Below is the Ireland poem:

Where was it exactly

I began to fall out of love with you? 
You say Ireland.  Maybe on the grosgrain
ribbon road from Shannon Airport
to Lisdoonvarna.  We lost two hubcaps,
a tire and my cool bouncing our bodies,
already punished by the plane ride,
over chuckholes large as bomb craters.

You learned to drive left days later
on the Ring of Kerry. I stopped screaming. 
After that ride (I compared it to whirling
in a blender all day – tour buses twirling
around us like sharp blades)
I tried to remember only soothing
blue water and the cool green hedges.
I refused to do another ring the next day. 
You agreed reluctantly.  You   hadn’t  
sat on the crater side of the car.

Perhaps it was in the seventh hardware
store where you searched for fishhooks,
made only in England, you said,
and probably now extinct. I gazed
at picture postcards of castles.

Maybe your charms began to fade in my smarting
smoke-filled eyes over a barbecue pot planted
against a post in the Burren Castle parking lot. 
Braced against Danielle’s angry breath, as she
skirted the Irish Coast, we shook sheets
of rain from slickered shoulders.  But you kept
turning meat, struggling to keep a steady heat,
your burning desire to take first prize supreme

Please don’t think me a total ingrate.  I asked
for adventure, I’d most likely do it again today,
if I hadn’t been there, done that.

Barbara J. Hamby c.1998

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