Seamus Cassidy

Seamus Cassidy was born in Chicago in 1943, the fourth of nine children, and grew up in a colonial town in New Jersey, where he enjoyed yearly summer visits from his Irish-born paternal Grandmother who was, like her son, his Uncle, a born storyteller.

During his high school years Cassidy lived on a small truck farm with milk-cows, pigs, chickens, honeybees, an apple orchard and vineyard--all of which he helped to tend. After finishing college and university he embarked on a career as a teacher of History and English in junior high and high school.
 
Cassidy is now a retired redhead whose editor-mentor describes him as "looking like a happy Robert Frost."  He has recently completed writing a soon-to-be-published book of dramatic monologues based on historical characters, with accompanying biographical sketches written by his editor friend, Mark Orrin.  Anne Marie Shea, Cassidy's wife and mother of their two children, daughter Erin and son Sean, has provided line sketches of each person profiled in the book.



Beneath the Cherry Trees
 
June winds like flower girls
scatter pink petals
over the Capitol's
reflecting pond's surface
 
Blood from twenty-two victims
and a suicide bomber
dries in pools on Baghdad streets
 
Beneath Washington's cherry trees
we sit and talk of peace and love
while down the promenade
Congress passes legislation
designed to end the fighting
 
Like bills not veto-proof
these ornamental trees
produce no fruit



Palm Sunday, Iraq 2008
 
No procession creeps
through Mosul's streets
this morning with shouts
of "Hosanna to the Son of David."
 
Yesterday's march to the cemetery
laid to rest the city's murdered Archbishop
wearing his pectoral cross
over his crimson cassock.
 
The market is deserted ...
except for a young donkey
walking over singed palm fronds
that still smolder on the ground
next to several shredded scraps
of black blood-soaked burkas.
 


Speed of Dark
 
Paddy's eyes stare darkly from pine branches
toward the bay as dusk drowns day

       ***

Shuttered behind closed windows
Nancy lights candles on the oak table;
like a lighthouse they flicker a signal
onto his stone path

        ***

His red face like a lobster hot from the pot,
black boots salt-staining a foot off the floor,
his clothes smelling of fresh salmon,
his mouth props a clay pipe
 
       ***

The speed of dark shrouds her linen table cloth
to wrap Paddy's nightly wake
 
       ***

He snores in time to the turf fire
that hisses rhythmic as waves
taking sand back out to sea


 
Spring Waking
 
Winter rains soaked
down to Spring's roots
as I hit bottom
that third of March
 
I didn't know
it was my last drink
of booze
till months later
when I knew
I'd wanted
it to be

By then
water'd done it's miracle--
flowers on stems
came straight out of
dark soil
 
Now I see
in a melting pond
my Spring waking


 
"Taste of that Salt Breath"
 
(Reflections on a verse of W. B. Yeats)
 
So, I'll take my watercolors
and go to where the rocks
reach out like Celtic hands
just in from the fields,
spread for the surging sea's cleansing.
 
There on promontories that jut out
to where the starving have all gone,
I sit and stare inhaling salt breath
your incoming tide exhales
upon these stones.
 
I want to taste the salt of seas
invading redhaired Vikings smelled,
remembering as they leaned back
to watch our green shores fade,
longed to return and learned to love our land,
then stayed to give birth
to all my wife and children's fierce red fire.
 
Now, upon my own head that bonfire
has retired to ash
where white-caps top me,
and I wave toward heaven
wondering when and why I've come today.
 
Oh,  I'll sit and paint on this stillpoint;
let waves outside me crash
and send their white-churning
to bound against the boulders
that fill my breathing chest.