Written After Viewing Photo Of My Wife Kim Jung Sook Ryan, Her Sister Sung Sook Holding Hands In Seoul,14 November 2023: Shame On You Ryans Poem by Dennis Ryan

Tuesday morning, December 12, 2023, begun at 8: 06 a.m. and completed at 8: 51 a.m.; re-entered on Poem Hunter for a second time at 9: 52 a.m.

—I thought about writing the following poem after seeing a photo of my wife Kim Jung Sook Ryan warmly holding hands with her oldest sister, Kim Sung Sook, outside Sung Sook's home in Seoul, South Korea on the afternoon of November 14, 2023, the day of Kim's return flight to the United States from Seoul.

Shame on you Ryans, all of you—
Patrick, Mary, Michael and Kathleen,
all of you who abandoned us in our extremity,
just as soon as you learned the police had us
in their sights … Suddenly you we're gone, out of
our lives, talking, gossiping, whispering behind our backs, staining us in your children's eyes, Mary and Neil Poop—
Poppendeck being the worst in this regard. Paul and Etta
are rolling over in their graves as I write, perturbed spirits,
spiting, spitting on all of you for your odious behavior—
you have stained our family name, Ryan, all of you!
And Mike, concerning your trip to Tipperary, Keeper's Hill,
what be the ghosts of the Ryan clan, distraught spirits, whispering loudly to you now—Is it your selfish cowardice? —
from Silvermines? How Edmond O'Ryan was so badly
betrayed by a kinsman with whom he had sought shelter,
how that kinsman knifed him in the neck while sleeping,
killed him in cold blood, only for Edmond's head to be
severed, impaled on an Irish city's gate spike for resident
English to admire? What say all of you Ryans, living and
dead, to that? Shame, shame pile on you, Patrick, Mary,
Michael and Kathleen Ryan for abandoning, betraying us—
Kim, Devin, Shawn and me—in our greatest hour of need.