The Poet & the Hell Raiser: Two Women of Words from County Cork

"Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living."

Sometimes, the words simply flow.

In the Irish tradition, that state of creative magic and illuminated inspiration is known as imbas forosnai.

This week’s KnotWork Storytelling guest, Aisling Fraser of

Words from across the Veil

is a practitioner of this ancient bardic art. She calls through poems that she understands to be a conversation with the land, the gods, and the ancestors.

And then, those artful words give us all a chance to dance with all the beauty, all the paradox, and all the pain of being alive.

A poem for those who were lost to both worlds

Aisling reads her poem “Homeland” during the latest KnotWork episode. When I first heard it, several months ago (Aisling is part of our global Writers’ Knot community and shared it with our group first), it caught me by the throat. It still won’t let me go.

In the poem, we encounter the memory of those who boarded the “coffin ships” to escape the hunger and poverty of 19th century Ireland. They left their own colonized island to try to make new lives in colonies that had been established across the oceans. 

Most poignantly, Aisling asks us to remember those who never reached the distant shore. 

Of course, those of us in the diaspora are the many times great grandchildren of those who did survive the journey. And those who call Ireland home are the descendants of those who stayed.

We all share the aunts and uncles who died during their passage, those who were lost to the neither-here-nor-there. They were probably young and unmarried and only just dreaming of having children who would be citizens of vaster, wilder continents. 

Now, these passengers just look like terminal branches on the family tree.

Oh, but these people had stories - both lived and longed for. How do we make room for these unknowable narratives?

What do we get from revisiting these fragments of ancestral tales?

Fundamentally, I think we seek out these scant anchors in the past because we feel rootless in modern times that lack true ceremony and cultural tradition. 

At our worst, we hide in the past, relishing (consciously or unconsciously) the privilege of escaping the horror of the now.

At our best, we look backward in order to understand the present and imagine a future that regenerates the best of the past and heals the old pain. 

How do we find the balance, tending to our roots and also minding our still growing branches?

It’s easy to overcorrect and begin to think: when there is so much pain in the present moment, how dare we lose ourselves in the poignancy of the past? 

Earlier this week, my friend, and past KnotWork storyteller,

Mitlé Southey

shared an image by Caitlin Blunnie, a queer reproductive justice artivist living in Virginia who makes her art under the name Liberal Jane. 

Art by Liberal Jane

That slogan, “Honor the dead & fight like hell for the living,” really hit me in my core.

It feels like an essential tenet of myth work and ancestral healing. It feels like why Aisling writes the poetry that she does.

It’s about a quest for wholeness that understands the nonlinear nature of time and, indeed, the entire universe. 

I had a feeling that line had a long history. And so it does. All the way back to County Cork, the very homeland of our guest poet Aisling Fraser.

Pray for the dead. Fight like hell for the living.

- Mary Harris, better known as Mother Jones

From an Irish Times article about the festival celebrating the 175th anniversary of the birth of Mary Harris (who we know as Mother Jones) in Shandon, on the north side of Cork City:

The second child of Richard Harris and Ellen Cotter, Mary Harris survived the Famine and in the early 1850s, with her mother and younger siblings, followed her father and older brother to Toronto.

She later got a teaching job in Michigan but moved first to Chicago and then in 1860 to Memphis, where she married ironworker George Jones and lived through the American Civil War, only to end up burying her husband and four young children when they died from Yellow Fever in 1867.¹

And she took her broken heart (and her trauma) and turned it into action. Known as a fiery orator and a tireless organizer, she was a force in the labor movement. She advocated for miners and railway builders across the racial divide and was particularly concerned with the plight of working children.

When introduced to a crowd once as a great humanitarian, she snapped: ‘Get it straight – I’m not a humanitarian. I’m a hell raiser.’

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How do you honor the dead and fight for the living?

In this moment when so many of the living are in danger, whether they are threatened genocide, or climate change, or a lack of community and care, we need all of us.

We need humanitarians.

We need hell raisers.

We need poets.

We need to remember the forgotten dead and heal those oldest wounds, even as we seek to staunch the bleeding in this moment.

1. https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/pray-for-the-dead-and-fight-like-hell-for-the-living-1.543655