I will tell you the sound the wounded make
First let this be clear:
I always knew what belonged to me
The piece of ground under my feet
Or my sleeping body was mine
And all the land between
An imaginary line fifteen feet
Above the high water mark
And the shore at low tide
Not including Manhattan
And in Spring, more,

Which might be why Mediterranean
Coastal regions pulled me
With their small tides
Or areas of high seismic activity
Such as Lisbon and San Francisco,
So much for place. Yes
It has mattered, yes we replace
Rock with the shimmering space
An idea of a rock where the rock has been

Yes, I understand abstraction
It is the welcoming  place
Into which strangers may come,
People with gypsy blood and skin
Darker again than that
Of certain fishermen along the coast
But that all said I was born outside the pale
And am outside it still. I do not fit in.

Let me tell you the sound the wounded make.
Vowels that rise out of slashed throats
Will be somewhat strangled
And inelegant in our Hiberno English-
The gurgled speech of Kosovo
Ringed with hard Dublin argot
from the inner city
Or drawn out by tender vowels in Clare
sounds uneducated as well as broken.
This is not sexy English
Not the accent to elicit
'Put a bit of butter on the spuds Andre.'

There were new Jews in Brooklyn, new Irish
In the Bronx  a hundred years ago —
their 'sweedhard' and 'stoah'
Unbecoming in the mouths of  young men
>From Carna or Warsaw. These are the sounds
The wounded make. 
An old man from the Gaeltacht  at a wedding
'Excuse me,  miss,  I don't speak English so good'
The Miss a branding iron.
In Irish the sentence would have sung.

We have spent a small ransom
Remembering  the famine
That some of us never forgot
In Universities all over America
And never gone looking for the ones that got away
from Mother Machree and the ancient order
of Hibernians, the black Irish.
They left in the darkened holds of coffin ships —
they arrive sealed in the holds of containers
wounded, sometimes dead, between the jigs and the reels
And the Cead Mile Failte.