The Apostrophe Blog
Great Hunger is my multi-part poem investigating the intersection of landscape and place as it relates to one ecological and humanitarian disaster, the mid-19th century Irish potato famine. This long poem was published by Anchor & Plume Press in Baton Rouge, Louisiana back in 2016. The series begins with a visit to the Irish Hunger Memorial in Lower Manhattan, mere blocks from the World Trade Center site, and meanders its way through historical texts, scraps of found language, the genealogy of my Flynn forbears as well as musings on famine and climate change. The section below speaks to the people who had to flee their homes when their primary source of food was ruined even as the English harvested and sold off other crops for export.
Potato Blight Diaspora
They were people from the wet.
Sharecroppers, seconds,
All sinful disarray.
Bleaching out and disappearing,
Captive to the raw of tuber ruin.
Holy-day riches absent a feast,
Unsteady, and never a madrigal
In choired pleas. Gone recollecting
How scald-hot once roasted the walls
Before desperate to flee met grim.
So many certainties disregarded,
Sloughed aside, stopped.
Urgency, the force that finally
Rousted them out, barely time to
Extinguish a hearth, bundle then knot
Belongings, measly and soil-crumbed.
Far too familiar with landless, wandering, betrayed—
Going, going, gone. Eons
Such hunger, devouring any
Sanctuary inside,
Inhabiting an appetite for
Ever.
I took the photo above in 2017. It is a close-up of the mast of what is known as the “coffin ship” sculpture by John Belan. It is part of the National Famine Memorial in Westport, Croagh Patrick, County Mayo, Ireland.
Interests: Reading, writing, not arithmetic. The art and craft of poetry. Photography. Vegetable and flower gardening especially heirloom bulbs and dahlias. Movies in real theatres. Theatre on real stages. Art in real galleries. Crossword puzzles and, of course, Wordle. Singer-songwriters like Aimee Mann and Patti Griffin. All kinds of music especially 1930s jazz. Venice, Italy! The Dude abides.
- Days Are Getting Longer, Blossoms Are Returning - February 3, 2026
- Acceptance News: wildscape literary journal - January 28, 2026
- To get the ink flowing again… - January 27, 2026
