While Sunday, March 17, is St. Patrick’s Day, Sedona’s nearly annual St. Patrick’s Parade will be held this Saturday, March 16.

Since the parade moved off State Route 89A to Jordan Road in Uptown, annual estimated attendance ranges between 3,000 and 5,500, depending mainly on the weather. Despite Irish-like rainy weather expected on Thursday and Friday, March 14 and 15, the skies should be sunny on Saturday with temperatures in the upper 50s.*

* Weather update: Saturday may have rain in the early morning and a snow flurry at upper elevations, a dry late morning, followed by a couple of showers in the afternoon. Dress accordingly.

Schoolchildren, businesses, clubs and nonprofit groups from around Sedona and the Verde Valley will be joined by public officials. Entrants come from as far away as Camp Verde and Flagstaff.

The parade and festival are not exclusive to Sedona residents and visitors. Sedona City Council members are often joined by mayors and council members from other communities.

Highlights of the parade from around the region include the Camp Verde Cavalry and others on horse­back, bagpipes and drums, royalty from the Yavapai- Apache Nation and representatives from the Sedona Fire District, U.S. Forest Service, Sedona Police Department, Sedona Area Veteran & Community Outreach, Sedona Heritage Museum, Northern Arizona Celtic Heritage Society and dozens of local nonprofits, businesses, social clubs and community organizations.

For the two decades before the city existed, the parade was hosted by Sedona merchants and then the Sedona Main Street Program, a nonprofit business organization, before its board voted to sunset itself in 2017 and hand the event over to the city of Sedona’s Parks and Recreation Department.

I write “nearly annual” because the parade was held every year since 1970 until the city canceled the 50th anniversary parade set for March 14, 2020, on the afternoon of March 12, citing COVID-19 concerns. In 2021, the city canceled the parade again even as COVID-19 vaccinations were becoming widespread and residents wanted a return to normal.

The parade returned in 2022 and last year, running as smoothly as it did before the pandemic. Thousands of Verde Valley residents attended to celebrate our Irish heritage, or the community at large under the guise of celebrating Irishness.

The St. Patrick’s Parade is one of the few events that remain to bring Sedona’s isolated cliques together and allow residents to gather as equals.

Being part Irish — of Clan McElwee from County Fermanagh in Ulster on my mother’s side — I always look forward to this celebration of my ancestry. While no one person can speak for an entire ethic group or nation, I can say that of all the countries of my ancestry that I’ve visited, I felt most at home and most welcome in Ireland.

I visited with two local friends a decade ago and felt less like a tourist and more like a long-lost grandson coming home. We visited tourist destinations, but also went caravan­ning with one of group’s relatives, stayed at a private home in Ballinteer, bar-hopped in Dublin and visited neighbor­hood pubs to take in the local music. I never felt a stranger.

At one such pub, I spotted man writing in a journal.

I caught him at the door, asked if he was writing poetry, and he asked how I knew.

I told him I could see his lines were written ragged right, which, as a poet myself, I knew denotes poetry, not prose.

He came back inside, told the barkeep and those around I was a fellow poet from America, bought a round of Jameson and Guinness and we talked for two hours about Seamus Heaney, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce and Patrick Kavanagh, while sharing some of our own poems.

“We’re a nation of poets,” he said of Ireland.

Across the pond, Irish immigrants were greeted with “No Irish Need Apply,” but we built your bridges, scraped your cities’ skies, married your daughters, bled with your sons and wove our blend into the fabric of America.

E pluribus unum.

You don’t have to have a drop of Irish blood to enjoy the St. Patrick’s Parade nor St. Patrick’s Day on March 17. Everyone is equal in an Irish pub.

Please enjoy this year’s St. Patrick’s Parade on Saturday, March 16. Afterwards, send feedback to the city’s Parks and Recreation Department to help improve the festival in the years to come.

Sláinte mhaith to you and yours.

Éirinn go Brách.

Christopher Fox Graham

Managing Editor

“When all the others were away at Mass”

By Seamus Heaney

When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.

So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives-
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

“Sailing to Byzantium“

By William Butler Yeats

I

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees,
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

II

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

III

O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

IV

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

“A Flower Given to My Daughter”

By James Joyce

Frail the white rose and frail are
Her hands that gave
Whose soul is sere and paler
Than time’s wan wave.

Rosefrail and fair — yet frailest
A wonder wild
In gentle eyes thou veilest,
My blueveined child.

“On Raglan Road”

By Patrick Kavanagh

On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue;
I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way,
And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.

On Grafton Street in November we tripped lightly along the ledge
Of the deep ravine where can be seen the worth of passion’s pledge,
The Queen of Hearts still making tarts and I not making hay –
O I loved too much and by such and such is happiness thrown away.

I gave her gifts of the mind I gave her the secret sign that’s known
To the artists who have known the true gods of sound and stone
And word and tint. I did not stint for I gave her poems to say.
With her own name there and her own dark hair like clouds over fields of May

On a quiet street where old ghosts meet I see her walking now
Away from me so hurriedly my reason must allow
That I had wooed not as I should a creature made of clay –
When the angel woos the clay he’d lose his wings at the dawn of day.