Follow the path of Sean Bothar
A haunted place where once stood homes
Feel the ghosts of An Gorta Mór
Lingering among the tumbled stones
Too poor to answer the immigrant call
Too weak to throw an American wake
Put to work building useless walls
In the mountains above Corrib’s Lake
This old road lined with hazel and gorse
Famine cottages with the family names
Bears the hoof prints of the pale rider’s horse
Bears witness to the oppressor’s shame
Two million souls lost to hunger’s grip,
The famine fever or the coffin ship
**A note: An Gorta Mór is ‘The Great Hunger’ referring to The Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s. The province of Connacht, where I live, was hit particularly hard by the famine and the evidence is all around us. Sean Bothar means Old Road in Irish and there is such a road near me and is featured in the header photo. An American Wake refers to a sendoff for anyone emigrating to the US, Canada or Australia, since the families would likely never see one another again. To those left behind it was as if their loved one had died. Thus the ‘wake’ to say goodbye.
Meg Sorick, Author/Artist 
Those times must have been awful…
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Indeed. I can’t even imagine it.
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I know it’s awful what they just have gone through
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Really nice poem! (And I think my husband and I tooled around Corrib Lake when we visited years ago.)
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Yes, if I remember correctly, you were in the heart of Connacht and you can’t have missed the lake; it’s the largest in the republic! And thank you!
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You have a good memory. Love your photos–they bring back mine!
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I can well imagine this being sung, sitting round a peat fire, in a pub. It is an old man singing in a strong, but mournful, voice!
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Ah, thanks! I’ll have to pass it along to the local musicians!
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I’m sure they’ll have a tune to fit!
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Moody poem, nicely done. It really is difficult to imagine the desperate plight of the people who suffered in that blight.
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Oh it is. I can’t even imagine the suffering and desperation. Thanks so much.
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It was a real tragedy, and the hard tasks they were put to to receive relief that you allude to were awful.
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Yes and so many of them were just follies. Roads to nowhere, stone walls than ran up mountainsides. So futile.
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Exactly that. It’s as though they were designed to humiliate.
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