Clap Your Hands and Dance
Trace the lines
on your palms
remember where
you want to go
feel those grooves
follow them
the life line
the marriage line
that line that starts
at your wrist
and disappears
feel no boundaries
in your fingertips
Begin here
The ties that bind. As we all know, there’s a bit of the double-edged blade contained in the phrase – and Jean Flanagan has spent much of her writing life exploring the ways ancestry and cultural history both bind us to past circumstances and offer meaning and cohesion in our present days. Focusing on Ireland and the Irish diaspora, her books Ibbetson Street and Black Lightning, portray a variety of familial relationships, from the utterly tragic to the joyous. A poem like “Clap Your Hands…” feels to me like the sort of benediction you might have heard from your Irish grandmother (had you been blessed with one.) Jean teaches in a variety of educational settings including an alternative sentencing program called “Changing Lives Through Literature.” She is also one of the founders of the Arlington Center for the Arts – a linchpin of our cultural community and a physical manifestation of the ways our lives are inextricably bound.