North Seamus Heaney Sligo John & Ellen

Came across this photo of Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception at Sligo, Ireland. I've spent a bit of time at Sligo over the years, digging around after a family myth. The last time I saw my  grandmother, Edith Hamilton Lillis, she was ninety-four, and she told me a story she'd not spilled before. When her parents were married at the Cathedral at Sligo in 1877, they were pelted with garbage as they came out of the church after the wedding. This inspired them to leave Ireland directly, which they did. It was a 'mixed' marriage: John Lillis was Catholic, Ellen Ormsby Hamilton was Protestant, and in Ireland at that time and place, never the twain shall meet. To marry in the Catholic church Ellen would have had to agree at a minimum to raise all the children Catholics, a promise she held to, even after the early death of her husband. Probably this 'disloyalty' would have enraged some elements of the Protestant population: but no one like mixed marriages, so perhaps two communities got together for a nonsectarian pelting. You never can tell, in Ireland. "Great hatred/little room/maimed us at the start" says Mr Yeats, who ought to know, as he grew up (mostly) in Sligo.  And Seamus Heaney from the North (Derry) had something to say about hatred, and how to survive it, if you were a writer:

NORTH

     Seamus Heaney

I returned to a long strand,

the hammered curve of a bay,

and found only the secular

powers of the Atlantic thundering.

I feel the unmagical

invitations of Iceland,

the pathetic colonies

of Greenland, and suddenly

those fabulus raiders,

those lying in Orkney and Dublin

measured against

their long swords rusting,

were ocean-deafened voices

warning me, lifted again

in violence and ephiphany.

The longship's swimming tongue

was buoyant with hindsight--

it said Thor's hammer swung

to geography and trade,

thick-witted couplings and revenges,

the hatreds and behindbacks

of the althing, lies and women

exhaustions nominated peace

memory incubating the spilled blood.

It said, "Lie down

in the word-hoard, burrow

the coil and gleam

of your furrowed brain.

Compose in darkness.

Expect aurora borealis

in the long foray

but no cascade of light.

Keep your eye clear

as the bleb of the icicle,

trust the feel of what nubbed treasure
your hands have known.