The Margaret and Sam Poems chronical an imagined set of deathbed conversations between Sam Norris and his aunt, Margaret Norris Patterson. Margaret and Sam were born in 1875 and 1901 respectively, both on the family farm in Ontario’s Hibbert Township.
Margaret became a doctor and was Lord Kitchener’s medical advisor in India. She went on to be a leader in Canada’s fight against the Spanish flu and served as Ontario’s first female judge. Sam inherited and ran the family farm.
The Norris ancestral farm was called Tyrone Farm and was located just outside of Omagh in Ireland’s County Tyrone. The long poem Omagh is written in the voice of the poet, Sam’s grandson, but with frequent interventions by Margaret and Sam.
Lines from the works of Omagh-born playwright Brian Friel are included in italics throughout the poem. Quotations from other works appear in quotation marks, the most notable of these being Thomas Mellon’s autobiographical work Thomas Mellon and His Times and Bad Bridget – Crime, Mayhem and the Lives of Irish Emigrant Women by Elaine Farrell and Leanne McCormick. Finally, the podcasts of the Mellon Centre for Migration Studies served as a factual source.
Poem, in its entirety, is available in the printed version of the current issue.
Bio:
RICHARD BRAIT is a corporate lawyer in Toronto. He has degrees in Engineering Physics and Law from Queen’s University, a graduate degree in Law from the University of Oxford, and (41 years later) an MFA in Poetry from Bennington College. In 2021 he won the Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Competition for Emerging Writers. Most recently, he placed second in the 2023 Dr William Henry Drummond Poetry Contest and in the 2024 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest.