Brother
Don’t look at the rosemary on the fridge
shelf – it will remind you of the lamb
you cooked yesterday and how you
laughed at the notion of posting
next Sunday’s roast Down Under.
Don’t think that staring at a television
screen will fill the void. The Sydney
cricket match on the afternoon sports
bulletin will emulate the scorch
of your dancing coal fire.
Don’t step outside to breathe the frosty air,
you might foolishly look up to the sky
and see the ethereal trail of a jumbo jet
oblivious that it and every emigrant ship
has carried fragments of others.
Don’t look at your young son stretched
out, colouring his pages with crayons
– it will only remind you of your brother,
six years your junior, of how you walked
the school route with him, his small hand in yours.
Brother was published in the Southword Literary Journal
Plenary Indulgence
Abrakedabra! and a plume of white smoke
Habemus Papam We have a Pope!
Through crimson curtains he emerges.
Immaculate.
Cassock and cape like fresh snow.
The conclave gushes behind
all blood red and sanguine.
They are umbilical
Connecting me to my grandmother
who polished her front step
with a tin of Cardinal Red
reciting her thirty-day-prayer
in rhythm with the bristles of her brush –
her incantation
a crucifix of indentation –
up and down, side to side, going nowhere.
The end result gleamed but was slippery
like dripping.
Do you know the Pope wears red shoes?
I do – for the blood of the martyrs
or maybe for their Ferragamo tag.
Do you know he wears a fisherman’s ring?
I do – for St. Peter who cast
his net into the sea
or maybe to dress his hand
with gold and diamonds.
Do you know he gives out a Plenary
Indulgences on special occasions?
I do.
And then the pope raised his hand
and drew the world to his palm
and to my surprise, for a moment, I remained there.
First published in Poetry 24.
Seven Sugar Cubes
On 10th April, 1901, in Massachusetts, Dr. Duncan MacDougall set out to prove
that the human soul had mass and was measurable. His findings concluded that
the soul weighed 21 grams.
When your mother phones to tell you that your father has died
ten thousand miles away, visiting your emigrant brother,
in a different hemisphere, in a different season,
do you wonder if your father’s soul will be forever left in summer?
Do you grapple
with the journey home of the body of a man you have known
since you were a body in your mother’s body?
Does the news melt into you and cool to the image
of his remains in a Tasmanian Blackwood coffin, in the body of a crate
in the body of a plane? Or do you place the telephone receiver back on its cradle,
take your car keys, drive the winter miles to your father’s field, where you know
his horses will run to the rattle, like dice, of seven sugar cubes.
first published in The Irish Times
You Have Become the Hand Rub of an Olympian
When your ashes return
in a small wooden box,
a brass plaque on top,
there is no cord
or record of attachment
to anything or anyone.
Somewhere a uterus
is evacuating itself –
a mass of patient vessels,
surrendering and collapsing
bereft of implantation,
their futile existence spent.
If we were to walk
every inch of the earth
or soar to a distant planet
we’d be utterly sure
of one thing now –
we’d find nothing
of you except these ashes –
not your cadaver
or the bony frame
of your being,
not the protrusion
of your dental arcs.
You’ve been reduced
to chalky powder
like the hand rub
of some Olympian
preparing to bar-cling.
If this box should open,
one accidental sneeze
might spell the resurgence
of your skin cells, hair
follicles, a glutinous eye
or a femur bone. Rewinding,
back-tracking,
you’ve been redacted
to the nothingness of an atmosphere.
(The Pickled Body)
Hypothesis
So the editor wants to know why
people are killing
themselves. I’ll tell you why –
because they are part of a revolution
they know nothing
about. Not a revolution with guns
and knives but one in its strictest
physical sense, the revolution
of the geoid, the planet earth.
We might share it with billions
but these days
we are each on our own
as it sits, upturned on its axis
slowly revolving, shaking off the detritus
until one by one
we cling to the surface
or free-fall into oblivion.
And so we concoct bizarre ways
to dodge our turn –
we are drawn to the oceans to hide
but drown in their deep waters,
we strive to weigh ourselves to the ground,
injecting ourselves like batteries
with liquid lithium.
To defy gravity
we anchor our ankles to balls and chains
or feel the ephemeral
ecstasy of letting
blood from our veins.
While some tie ropes around their necks
as they take their turn,
ready to hang
from the world, like a tarot card I once saw.
Brother and other poems are © Clodagh Beresford Dunne
Clodagh Beresford Dunne was born in Dublin and raised in the harbour town of Dungarvan Co. Waterford, in a local newspaper family. She holds degrees in English and in Law and qualified as a solicitor, in 2001. During her university and training years she was an international debater and public speaker, representing Ireland on three occasions, at the World Universities Debating Championships. Her poems have appeared in publications including The Stinging Fly, The Irish Times, Southword, The Moth, Spontaneity and Pittsburgh Poetry Review. She was the recipient of the Arts Council of Ireland Emerging Writer Award Bursary (2016) and a number of Literature awards and residencies from Waterford City and County Arts Office. In April 2016 she delivered a series of readings, interviews, and lectures, at Carlow University and Robert Morris University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as part of Culture Ireland’s International Programme. In February 2017, as part of the AWP Conference and Book Fair in Washington, DC, she participated in a reading and discussion panel: “A World of Their Own” (five female poets in cross-cultural conversation) with US poets, Jan Beatty and Tess Barry, Irish poet, Eleanor Hooker, and Lebanese poet, Zeina Hashem Beck. She is a founding member, coordinator, and curator of the Dungarvan and West Waterford Writers’ Group. She lives in Dungarvan with her husband and four young children.
Chris Murray 