Ethna McKiernan's "My Mother Gave Me Away to the Tinkers"

Today, a poem that I've turned into a song for second post honoring two Irish-American poets who led an annual St. Patrick's Day poetry reading in Minnesota for several years before their death. Of the two, Ethna McKiernan had more direct ties to Ireland, having spent some time living in Dublin, and eventually in Minnesota running an Irish arts store in the Twin Cities for many years.  When she would read her poem "The Day My Mother Gave Me Away to the Tinkers" she would instruct the listeners that, just as with many people, her busy mother had issued that threat in jest, and that the subject of this poem was her teenage mind thinking "Well, I'll take her up and that, and then she'll be sorry." Of course, in order to realize this new song, there's a man singing this mother-daugher poem. That might be a detriment. And I made a mistake singing the name of a baker mentioned in the poem, Johnston Mooney and O'Brien. I dropped the "Johnston" but at first figured, no one would care, that it must be just some immaterial tiny particular bakery -- but it turns out that firm is a very famous Irish bakery, Oh well. I hope you enjoy the song anyway. And if you want to get it right, it's in her final new and selected collection available from her Irish publisher at this link. The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and combines them with original music in differing styles. We've done over 850 of these combinaitons, and you can hear any of them and read about our encounters with the words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org