The Somnambulist Who Stood Still
1.Odorous 2.Lady Gaga 3.Death by delirium 4.The num num num num num num num poem. 5.Bubble Butt Jew |
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Eight new poems will be published later this year in three anthologies. |
Category: A Saturday Woman Poet
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Charles Bukowski is my Dad
He stands with me in the
best-dressed-lady-line,
holding open my pearl lace
umbrella to the
ravaging Galway rain.He calls me up on
blue Mondays and gives me
whiskey on bold Fridays.He fills up my father-space
He fills up my mind-space
He fills up my hot-water bottleHis advice fills up my cheer
and revives my rotted liver,but that’s a small price to pay
because Bukowski’s my Dad.He’s my feather pillow
and my guitar string.He’s my soccer coach and sex therapist
He paints my nails
pepperminty green and singsraindrops keep falling on my head
on wicked trips to the racetrack.
But that’s a small price to
because Bukowski’s my dad.Biteens
Little biteens of people, pieces all over the raven pavements and sprayed on the cracked gutters, bits of them strewn on the carpeted lanes, and propped against wheeley bins like the carcasses of bored butlers, bits of them.
Biteens of people, shards of anoraks and faded canvas shopping bags, sloven splinters of their teeth, angles of jawlines where jaws used to sit, pieces of people, god help them, dead to rush hour, dead.
Silver wisps of greasy dandruffy dead hair.
Dead waiting at the bus stop dead waiting at the counter top dead waiting at the social shop dead waiting at the hospital drop dead waiting at the morgue spot.
Putting biteens of sharred shoulders to the wind,
their half bodies and eaten bones.The blush-blown look of the cretins, blown out of our way down alleys in corpo houses on free bus spins on acid on nebulisers on tea on glue and sugar on lithium on valium on sadnesss and sorrow on beauty on faith.
Biteens of people, pieces of them, imagine it.
Light a candle or two.
For their mass cards and petitions, for their shopping bags for our lady and their prescriptions, for their mothers for their missing sons and for their saints.
Bog Fairies
The heather like
Pork belly cracked
Underneath my feet-The horizon like
Nougat, melted
Its pastel line at the heath edge
Blue fading to white light.We stacked rows of little
Houses for bog fairies –
Wet mulchy sods
Evaporating under our small palms.Crucifixions of dry brittle crosses
Forming the skeleton-
My narrow ankles parallel to them.Coarse and tough like the marrow of the soul,
Like the skeletons crucified under the peat.The turf will come good
My father said
When the wind blows to dry it.We dragged ten-ten-twenty bags
With the sulphury waft of cat piss,
Along a track dotted with deep black bogholes,
Then over a silver door, like a snail’s
Oily trail leaving a map for the moon,
And for bog fairies to dance in the mushy earth-
For us all to glisten in this late summer.And behind the door
Once upon some time
Old women sat in black shawls
Bedding down Irregulars and putting kettles
On to boil for the labouring girls.But I was gone.
I was gone at ten in my mind’s eye.
I was dragging Comrades from the Somme
I was pulling Concords in line with Swedish giants
I was skating on the lake in Central Park
I was crouched in the green at Sam’s Cross
I was touring Rubber-Soul at Hollywood Bowl
I was marching on Washington with John Lewis
I was in the Chelsea Hotel with Robert Mapplethorpe,
He was squatting on my lap with his lens,
Swearing to Janis Joplin I could find her a shift,
Nothing is impossible when you blow like that girlfriend.
I sang Come As You are in Aberdeen with union converse,
Blue eye liner and mouse holes in my Connemara jumper.I was anyone but me
I was anywhere but here
I was goneWe rushed to hurry before the summer light would fade
Because animals needed to be washed and fedAnd turf needed to be stacked
And all the talk of our youth
Would be said
In whispers and secrets, or written on postage stampsBecause light was the ruler as it was closing in around us,
Beating us, like the dark on the workmen
Deep in the channel tunnel that night.The black light killed the purple heather
Yet I danced on the crackle in the dust
I crackled on the dust in the heather
My dance on the heather turned to dust.Pity the Mothers
Pity the mothers
who weathered their skin
to raise their sons to die.Pity the routine,
the daily stretching table
ferociously making meet ends.Pity the mothers who told
sons the world was tough and wild-To have them sold out in the early hours
of mornings’ immutable stage
fresh and stung.Brave the world
They should have said
Brave its bold beauty
Brave the world my brave sons
And be beautiful
Because fear is a choking kite string in a storm.Fear is a punctuating dictator
Fear will drive you half insane
and there’s no spirit in half a cup of anything.Fear will wake your sleep and damn your
first born nerves.There is no fertility in fear
no function, no performance.Be a kite
Be yellow
Be bold
Be madDon’t step at the edge of it
all and send your body half-way
forward to the sea-froth.For there you will find the headwinds.
Pity the bags, shoes, boots,
hurls mothers left
by the door.The endless soups and syrups
The forever effort
The long lasting kisses they left on young jawsTo send them to the world fearful
And then feared.
To send them to the world with pity
And then pitied.Pity the mothers
with their strong
elbows worn from effort.Struggling against headwinds-
sanding the grain
in the wrong direction.Pity the mothers
Who weathered their skin
just to raise sons to die.Sylvia Plath You Are Dead
Sylvia Plath you are dead.
Your tanned legs are dead.Your smile is dead, and
Massachusetts will mourn herGirl on lemonady days
on sunshiny daysShe will mourn her on dark days
when screaming girls go madIn maternity wards
and scream in domestic wards,And cry handfuls of slathery salty water
in kitchens over ironing boards.Sylvia Plath you are dead,
and girls try rubbing out stretched markson their olive silver skin, until they
bleed. Their tiny babies cry in the hallsuntil windows framed with candy
colours, fog over their minds, their aprons, their skirtstheir college ways, where there were no lessons on
crying. Silvery Plath the moon howls at themtaunted by strong winds, out the garden paths
gusts blow heads off the ivy shoulders,but heather keeps her low profile
her head down, smiling.Mass
Mass will be said for no more bad language and gambling and wanking that the Athenry boys are doing, down the back of the castle, down the back of the couch, all the punching and hitting and groaning, moaning at the Turlough boys, the Clarinbridge boys, the boys from Killimordaly, down the back of the Presentation grounds.
There will be mass when you lose at the Galway Races and for the saving of your soul if you take the boat to Cheltenham.
There will be a mass for when the horse runs, and when the horse dies, and for the bookies who win and the punters who win,
and the bookies who lose and the punters who lose.
There will be mass for hare coursing and flask-filling.
There will be mass for your Inter Cert and your twenty-first,
There will be a filling-out-your-CAO-form mass.
Mass will be held in the morning before the exams, mass will be held in the evening for your bath.
There’ll be a special mass on Saturday afternoon for your Granny. There will be a mass for your Granny’s boils and aches and black lungs and ulcers and spots and diabetes and psychosis.
There’ll be a mass for the anointing of the bollix of the bull above in the field near the closh over the railway bridge.
Mass will be held before the College’s Junior B Hurling Final, it will be held for the Connaught Cup Junior A Regional Final in wizardry and sarcasm.
Mass will be held on top of the reek for the arrogant and meek, and the bishop will arrive by eurocopter. There will be a mass to get him up in one piece and back in one piece.
Masses will be held in the outhouse.
Mass will be held for the safe arrival of new lambs and the birthing of ass foals.
Mass will be held in your uncle’s sitting room but his neighbours will be envious and later stage a finer mass.
There will be a mass to find you a husband, and a few masses to pray he stays.
There will be a good intentions mass. Your intentions if they’re good will come true. Mass will be held for your weddings and wakes and when you wake up.
Mass will be held for the Muslim conversion.
Mass will be held for George Bush.
Mass will be held for the war on terror.
Mass will be held for black babies and yellow babies and the yellowy black babies.
Mass will not be held for red babies. They have upset Pope John Paul.
Mass will be held for your brother when he gets the meningitis from picking his nose. Mass will be held for your cousins when they stop going to mass.
Mass will be held for the harvest and the sun and the moon and a frost and a snow and for a healthy spring and red autumn, for a good wind and no wind, and for a good shower and a dry spell, and for the silage and the hay and the grass and the turf.
There will be a saving-of-the-turf day. There will be a saving-of-the-hay day. There will
be a saving-my-soul day.There will a mass for the fishing fishermen.
There will be multiple masses for Mary around August when she did all the appearing.
There will be a good mass when the statue cries rusty tears. There will be a good mass and a great collection.
Mass will be held for the cloud people.
Mass will be held for apparitions and anniversaries and weddings and baptisms.
Mass will be held to church your sinned body after giving birth, there will be mass to wash your unclean feet.
Mass will be held for all your decisions so you don’t have to blame yourself.
There will be mass for the poor dead Clares. There will be mass for the Black Protestants if Paisley allows it. Mass will be held for the De Valera’s and the Croke Park goers.
There will be a mass for the conversion of the Jews (and their collection).
There will be a mass for the communion class, there will be a mass for the no-name club non-drinkers. There will be a giving-up-smoking-the-Christian-way mass.
There will be a mass for the Christian Angels, only Christian ones.
There will be no mass for your freedom, but the air will be pea sweet and the sky will clear.
Mass will not be held for the souls of your gay sons.
Mass will not be held for victims, for cynics, anti-clerics, the song-and-dance makers, the antagonising atheists, the upsetting-the-apple-cart persons.
There will be no women’s mass.
There will be no mass solely by women for women. Your daughters will not hold mass.
There are strict rules for the masses.The above poems are © Elaine Feeney and have been published by The Stinging Fly, Once Upon Reflection, and The Radio was Gospel (Salmon Poetry 2013)
Elaine Feeney is considered a leading part of political contemporary Irish writers. She was educated in University College Galway, University College Cork and University of Limerick. Feeney has published three collections of poetry Indiscipline (2007), Where’s Katie? (2010, Salmon) and The Radio was Gospel (2013, Salmon) Her work has been published widely in literary magazines and anthologies. She is currently working on a novel.
“Elaine Feeney is the freshest, most engaging and certainly the most provocative female poet to come out of Ireland in the last decade. Her poem ” Mass”, is both gloriously funny, bitter-sweet in the astuteness of its observations and a brilliant, sly window into the Irish female Catholic experience. Her use of irony is delicious. Her comments on the human condition, which run throughout her lines, are in the tradition of Dean Swift and she rightfully takes her place alongside Eavan Boland and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill is a very, very important Irish voice.” Fionnuala Flanagan, California 2013 (Praise for The Radio was Gospel, 2013, Salmon)
“A choice collection of poetry, one not to be overlooked, 5 Stars” Midwest Book Review, USA, (Praise for Where’s Katie? 2010, Salmon Poetry).
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Poemín
This poem
Will be
Exquisitely short
And
Dinkily dedicated
To you.
Popularity, Personified
Smugness was her scarf,
Inked pinkly, cerisely,
She stroked it smugly.
Smugness was her scarf.
Idleness was her chignon,
Gleaming, burnished, shiny
She fondled it idly.
Idleness was her chignon.
Cuteness was her weapon,
Trigger fingered, ready,
She cocked it cutely.
Cuteness was her weapon.
Blandness was her boyfriend,
Broad-shouldered, dreamy,
She loved blandly.
Blandness was her boyfriend.
For Heaney
The sorrow’s mine and yours.
It’s all of ours. We shake our heads.
Now, when we want words,
We will rifle and riffle
Through pages printed.
We will thumb-skim his volumes.
We will become accustomed,
And forget to mourn, as we do today,
For his bits of the world welded to
Bits of the meaning of the world.
With those new silvered weldings,
Hand-soldered together by him,
Scudding from him to us.
We will miss his missiles of insight.
Tír na nÓg
I saw Tír na nÓg
For the first time
Yesterday.
From the car, while driving
On the M8, before Thurles.
All the plants,
All the trees faced it,
Pulled to it.
I felt the pull myself.
The draw.
And the island?
A mossy green copse,
Saturated in spring green.
On this bright day,
A wisp of mist hung
There. Around.
The rounded island
Otherworldly.
Ah, the longing.
The longing for it lingers.
Offering
I would bring you white roses
And mysterious irises
And open sunflowers
If they would let me
I would bring you sweet port wine
And hoppy beers
And tiny dry Champagne bubbles
If they would let me
I would bring you blissful heat
And cooling showers
And misty hovering bridge fog
If they would let me
I would bring you woven blankets
And intriguing ceramics
And all the treasures of this New World
If they would let me
But they won’t let me
And I just can’t choose
The best offering for you
So my lines will have to suffice.
Please let my lines suffice.
Popping Candy
Your company is
Like popping candy
Fizzing in my head.
Your company is
Like deft acupuncture
Painlessly needling me.
You say something
So unexpectedly funny
That I almost snort.
How long does
Popping candy last?
Does anyone know?
Popping Candy and other poems published here are © Sarah O’Connor.
Sarah O’Connor is originally from Tipperary. She studied in UCC and Boston College, and she now lives in Dublin. She previously worked in publishing and now works in politics. She is 34. She is working on her first novel and on a collection of poetry. She has been published by Wordlegs and The Weary Blues.
Sarah O’Connor blogs at The Ghost Station & tweets at @theghoststation. -
Role reversal by Nessa O’Mahony
after Eavan Boland
There will come a time, mother,
when the transformed spring opens up
and the charioteer holds out a hand;
he might have my father’s face, might not;
his gestures might be gentle or rough
as he eases you into a space made ready
and shows you the pomegranate.
And you will take the seed and eat,
willingly perhaps, not caring
that every bargain has its cost,
or will your hand be stayed
by the sun’s ray on your face?
I will not have time to catch up,
to forestall the nine long days,
the nine long nights of wandering.
And I’ll have no deal to strike;
no backward glance, no waiting
for the seasons to turn back to me.
© Nessa O’Mahony from Her Father’s Daughter (Salmon Poetry)
Nessa O’Mahony was born in Dublin and lives in Rathfarnham where she works as a freelance teacher and writer. She won the National Women’s Poetry Competition in 1997 and was shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Prize and Hennessy Literature Awards. She was awarded an Arts Council of Ireland literature bursary in 2004 and 2011. She has published four books of poetry – Bar Talk, appeared (1999), Trapping a Ghost (2005) and In Sight of Home (2009). Her Father’s Daughter was published by Salmon in September 2014. She completed a PhD in Creative Writing in 2006 and teaches creative writing for the Open University. She is a regular course facilitator at the Irish Writers Centre in Dublin.Grianstad by Aoife Reilly
.
Swirls of starlings
absail between sun and moon
hurl themselves into a dance
through ghosts of trees
they go where they need to go.
winter shrouds
Long nights slide in
embers empty the land
dying woods wait for the earth to turn
In the betwixt and between
I am a still frame in the granite glow
and leaves are twisted silver songs
Stars gasp, turf smoke curls
Crisscrossing the place where love was exhausted
and blankets way down in the moment before light
Ready now, I follow the starlings and birth another year.
© Aoife Reilly
Aoife Reilly is living in County Galway and is originally from County Laois. She is a teacher and psychotherapist. She has been attending poetry workshops with Kevin Higgins at the Galway Art Centre since September 2013 and has read at open mike of the Over The Edge Series at Galway City Library.
The Golden Hare by Mary Cecil
Where wild flowers cling
And heather sweetly grows
The magic hare reclines
With fur of glowing gold
His spirit of quiet magnificence
In lands of legends born
Where unicorns are dreamt of
And fairies sport in human form
To catch a fleeting glimpse
Against the burning sky
A moment in a lifetime
A flash of mystery goes by
Where came his golden sheen
That gift from other realms
To add a glowing wonder
Hidden in the ferns
So swift he flees
With graceful lops he leaps
Transporting us to mystical lands
To dream of when we sleep
© Mary Cecil
Rathlin Island
Mary Cecil is the mother of large family and Grandmother to eleven. The widow of Rathlin Island’s famous campaigner, diver, author (Harsh winds of Rathlin) Thomas Cecil. Lover of Rathlin Island, Northern Ireland’s only inhabited island. Mary enjoys community development and current events. She has been writing poetry for several years. Enjoys writing a variety of poems, spiritual, war, romantic, protest and nature. Keen to compose more poems based on Rathlin Island’s myths & legends. She worked in owning andmanaging tourist facilities both on and off Rathlin Island. Public Appointment as Lay Member, The Appropriate Authority, Criminal Legal Aid Board.. The Brightest Jewel by Christine Murray
The perfume of rosemary for remembrance.
Little botanic flower baptised in Glas Naíon,
the stream of the infants.
I see the pink flower of your hand
reaching up to your blind mouth.
I breathe your name so you will live.
The stream of the infants.
Cymbidium Minuets, the flowers that you loved
grow in a house of orchids near a dark still pool
quiet by the stream of the infants.
The Brightest Jewel is © Chris Murray and was first published in V4, Issue #4 of The WomenArts Quarterly Journal. (2014)
Christine Murray Christine Murray is a City and Guilds qualified restoration stonecutter living in Dublin, Ireland. Her Chapbook Three Red Things was published by Smithereens Press in June 2013. A collection of poems Cycles was published by Lapwing Press in 2013. A dark taleThe Blind (Poetry) was published by Oneiros Books in 2013. Her second book-length poem. She was published in Spring 2014 (Oneiros Books). Her second chapbook Signature was published in March 2014 by Bone Orchard Press.
Mastectomy by Shirley McClure
You get given
certain things in twos –love-birds, book-ends,
matching china tea mugs –and even though
on any given morningit is all you even think of
to hook one fine chinatop designer
duck-blue tea-mugfrom your dry beech
draining rackto boil and pour and stir
and watch Darjeeling towers spiral;there are still the days
when there is company for breakfast,and on these fine mornings
let me tell youit is good to know
that there are twoextra special, same but different
unchipped breakfast blue mugs……..made to grace
your table.© Shirley McClure From Who’s Counting?
Living in Bray, Co. Wicklow, Shirley McClure won Cork Literary Review’s Manuscript Competition 2009 and Listowel Writers’ Week Originals Poetry Competition 2014. Her collection, Who’s Counting? is available from Bradshaw Books or via http://www.thepoetryvein.com/ She facilitates creative writing courses and workshops.Geyser by Alice Lyons
You e-mailed your whole desktop, which is typical
.the blue of it Scrovegni chapel blue
a smile I’ve never seen before it is aware of smiling
reveals itself to the camera in the computer.
Squared-off angels, no they are JPEGs, hover
over a faux Polaroid you switched to sepia mode
so I wouldn’t look like a geyser
a river of years to reach such tender self-regard
for a moment you are unencumbered
by the monster critical eye (you meant geezer)
scissored hair blunt and sister-like and merciful
your entire kitchen liquid in the glossy Frigidaire.
It puts me in mind of Fra Angelico, those tricky frescoes
(I seem to translate everything to quattrocento time)
Christ in a blindfold, eyes like poached eggs gazing
down and inward, the gathered regal robes
the marble throne all white and pouring up, yes
like a geyser pouring up while Roman soldiers
unencumbered by their bodies beat and spit and mock.
I have always loved those arrested gestures
the mute green rectangle beautiful as your computer
in Philadelphia where Safari’s compass points
permanently Northeast and the Finder icon smiles
twice and benevolently straight on and in profile.
from Poetry Ireland Review 100 (ed. Paul Muldoon)
Note: Versions of ‘The Boom & After the Boom’, ‘Developers’ and ‘Reverse Emigration’ first appeared in Poetry(Chicago), December 2011.- A Poetry Foundation Podcast The Woman Who Quit featuring work by Alice Lyons.
Alice Lyons was born in Paterson, New Jersey and has lived in the West of Ireland for fifteen years. Her poems have appeared in publications such as Tygodnik Powszcheny (Kraków) and POETRY (Chicago), as public installations in Staircase Poems at The Dock in Carrick-on-Shannon and as poetry films in cinema and gallery screenings worldwide.She is the recipient of the Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry, the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary, an Academy of American Poets Award and multiple bursaries in literature and film from An Chomhairle Ealoine/The Arts Council. Her poetry film, The Polish Language, co-directed with Orla Mc Hardy, has screened in competition in over 30 film festivals worldwide and garnered numerous awards including an IFTA nomination. Her new poetry film, Developers, premiered at Oslopoesie, Norway in 2013. She has lectured in English and Fine Art at Boston University, Maine College of Art, the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology and Queen’s University, Belfast. She holds a Ph.D. from the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen’s University, Belfast. She is currently curator of Poetry Now, Dun Laoghaire.
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Warning Shots
When you live on the edge
of an ocean, you cannot pretend
you did not see it coming.
The leaves are still, birds
chatter, the sea is a sheet
of steel. But out west
where last night the sun
left a sky illumined
like stained glass
dirt heaps up,
someone else’s dustpan
emptied on your doorstep
and a magpie
rattling gunfire
at first light.
First published in Cyphers and subsequently in Of Birds and Bones
Flotilla
‘Heaven Scent’ Magnolia
They tack in, full rig, under cover of darkness,
dock before dawn in cement-paved ports
at wharves of picket fence. The voyage
has been long through winter’s bald estates,
gusting grit and dust have shred their sails
to votive rags, bound now to every leafless branch.
Waxen petals blood-tinged white
glow like manna at first light.
First published in Abridged and subsequently in Of Birds and Bones
Left Luggage
This morning I woke with seawater
in my mouth. My eyes felt rinsed,
like after crying, my veins were
scoured, my limbs wrung out.
I was beached on a fogbound bed.
Adrift. Missing the aquatics.
Nothing is lost, just out of reach.
Everything that ever was, is –
somewhere – if only we can
get there, find the key, remember
the encrypted PIN, be brave enough
to jump. Know how to swim.
If only our feet have not been bound
at birth, our wings trimmed back
like wicks to suit our mothers, or
cobbled to a gooey mess by fathers,
confusing the discrete powers of
son and sun, deluded and controlling.
As long as no-one changed the locks
along the way and didn’t tell us, or
dropped the keys or, worse still, built
a breeze block wall – a suicide bunker –
performing hara-kiri on our dreams. Left
bag and baggage rotting on the floor.
This morning I was reminded
by a taste of salt that we do not waste
those supine hours spent sprawled
unconscious in an oarless bed;
that we are all at sea, our time well spent
diving, back and back, to unpick locks, find home.
First published in The Stinging Fly and subsequently in World Without Maps
Le Jardinier Vallier
after Cézanne
There is an ease slips through the body
after work well done. The heart
minds its own business, leaves alone
the slack repose of limb and bone.
On summer days we’d find him there,
still as a lizard by the orchard wall,
hat over his eyes, his hands asleep
on his thighs. The chair
was never moved. C’est la chaise
de Monsieur Vallier, we were told.
As if this explained everything—
the silence of his deer-like tread,
his loping gait. The way he came
and went unseen. How the garden
sang with light and shade.
First published in Small Lives (Poddle Publications) and subsequently in Of Birds and Bones
The Suitcase of Bees
She brought it with her everywhere,
its silver, dimpled surface effervescent
with the whirr of wings within. In public
she would spread her skirt’s thick folds
to mute the angry drone, paint a smile
across her face, hope no-one would notice.
Once inside her own four walls
the vibrations grew so shrill
she held her head and hummed.
The ambulance crew was gentle
as they led her owl-eyed through the gates,
bees still rustling taffeta in her head.
The case was silent, a ruse
in sly collusion with the doctor
who swore she was an expert,
knew all there was to know
of stings and swarms, their stridency,
how to outface the queen.
They built a wooden beehive,
surrounded it with lemon balm, sweet basil, mint.
And now, except for mild tinnitus, she is calm.
A version first published in The Interpreter’s House; subsequently in World Without Maps
Dublin-born Geraldine Mitchell lives on the Co. Mayo coast, overlooking Clare Island. She won the Patrick Kavanagh Award in 2008 and has since published two collections of poems, World Without Maps (Arlen House, 2011) and Of Birds and Bones (Arlen House, 2014). She is also the author of two novels for young people and the biography of Muriel Gahan, Deeds Not Words. -
Adagio for Strings
My heart that soared and climbed
To other realms of fantasy
That longs to find the answers
To everything
To dream those endless dreams
To drift in waves of oceans
Of oneness complete
And really know
In pools of beautiful thought
Transport my soul
Where heaven will be
And let me be
© Mary Cecil
The Golden Hare
Where wild flowers cling
And heather sweetly grows
The magic hare reclines
With fur of glowing gold
His spirit of quiet magnificence
In lands of legends born
Where unicorns are dreamt of
And fairies sport in human form
To catch a fleeting glimpse
Against the burning sky
A moment in a lifetime
A flash of mystery goes by
Where came his golden sheen
That gift from other realms
To add a glowing wonder
Hidden in the ferns
So swift he flees
With graceful lops he leaps
Transporting us to mystical lands
To dream of when we sleep
© Mary Cecil
Rathlin Island
.
Written for Master Daire James Mc Faul of Rathlin Island
so wild the seas that flow,
Around his island home
Gently slept a baby,
Waiting to be born
Dreaming in his world,
Where perfection waits to be
A Raghery boy is made,
To cross the wildest sea
Generations of hardy men,
Created in his bones
A harmony of oceans,
With men from island homes
So sleep and dream your days,
The tides will wait for you
To carry you ever onwards,
Towards your faithful crew
And you will lay your anchor,
As generations before
Where your footsteps lead you,
Beside the beckoning shore
8th December 2014
© Mary Cecil
Mystic Days
I see you, a shadow in my mind,
Like a half remembered dream,
Drifting in the periphery
Of my consciousness
I glimpse you in the sunlight,
Like a song floating in the air
That cannot be captured,
Yet so sweetly enraptures me
My mind hesitates,
To escape the illusion of you
Your un-summoned presence,
That embraces my heart
Until again you vanish,
Like petals in the wind
The turbulence in your wake,
Tearing the tranquillity of my reverie
Yet stay my sweet
In my loving longings,
That we again can be,
In our world together
© Mary Cecil
.Mary Cecil is the mother of large family and Grandmother to eleven. The widow of Rathlin Island’s famous campaigner, diver, author (Harsh winds of Rathlin) Thomas Cecil. Lover of Rathlin Island, Northern Ireland’s only inhabited island. Mary enjoys community development and current events. She has been writing poetry for several years. Enjoys writing a variety of poems, spiritual, war, romantic, protest and nature. Keen to compose more poems based on Rathlin Island’s myths & legends. She worked in owning andmanaging tourist facilities both on and off Rathlin Island. Public Appointment as Lay Member, The Appropriate Authority, Criminal Legal Aid Board . -
Prayer for my New Daughter
with lines by Audre Lorde and William Butler Yeats
A soul in chrysalis, in first agonized molt,
must choose: LADIES, or MENS.
For some—for you—these rooms are fraught,
an open field where lines are drawn: think of
the White-Only signs. Or Serrano’s Piss Christ
and Duchamp’s Fountain, pitted with acid
and icepicks, de-faced. As for restrooms called
“Bathrooms with Urinals,” no, his words
will never dismantle the master’s house.
For an hour I have walked and prayed,
musing on icepicks, how they’re made
to fit a blind hand; how kept so well honed.
You are soft as sown grass and fierce as cut glass.
You pack your new purse with lipstick, and mace.
First published in North American Review, Fall 2014.
[Note: written after an attack on transgender college students attempting to use a restroom with a sign that said “Bathroom with Urinals”]
Sufferance
1,123 reported killings of trans people worldwide within the last five years.—Examiner.com
Transgender, as in counterfeit, as in someone appearing
or attempting to be a member
of the other gender, as in equated with transsexual
or cross-dresser or pervert
as in a term used by ugly girls as a defense mechanism
against prettier girls. As in
the only solution lies in psychology or religion or,
until 1960, an icepick lobotomy
done without drugs. Sufferance means passive permission
from lack of interference,
as in tolerance of something intolerable, the teen set on fire
at the back of the bus, the way the world
daily scathes you, my fear for your safety a daily sufferance,
as in endurance, as in [archaic] misery,
as in Middle English or Latin equivalent of suffer, akin
in its way to suffrage,
the right to vote. As in vote for, support—child, I am trying
to support you in this—
as in Ecclesiastical, a prayer, an intercessory prayer or petition.
Intercessory, come between.
Intercede, yes—my body—between yours and theirs.
First published in the Bellingham Review 2015 (Finalist, 49th Parallel Award)
Blame
the olive tree that dropped its great gout
of dark fruit onto asphalt for the swerve
and spinout etched in fresh virgin press;
blame the natural law that made helpless
bodies attract and collide then come to rest
in the acacia-treed canyon. The driver sat
behind the wheel, his side not pierced,
not yet. Yes, he was drunk, but only
with joy for the lovely, lithe boy
now fused with the car, shrinkwrapped
in leather and steel, and veiled
in the webbed windshield; the boy
who sang backup Gospel like a bruised angel
and was the hope of his whole Bronx block.
Blame the last bright note that opened
his throat and sank into pollen and dust.
First published in The Seattle Review, 2010.
Gratitude for an Autistic Son
He speaks, and when we speak, he understands.
Not like my friend’s boy, who tap-taps the board
behind his bed, sucking on both his hands.
Who taps the wood with his forehead, in a kind
of mandarin code. A light’s gone underground:
no speech, but he can gesture and understand
—better off than the steel-cribbed child, blind
even to pain, left at the Home. Whose eyes are wide
and blue. Who also began by sucking his hands,
then his teeth came in. What’s left of his hands
are mittened in gauze and bound to his side—
our son speaks. He talks, we talk. He understands.
And this is the crux: he talks; we understand
when he hungers or thirsts, is sad or scared.
He’s not left in his shit, we put food in his hands.
He’s not wild pinned in a trap, chained
to his own spine, gnawing the only way out.
He speaks. He holds a pen. He understands.
He has all of all of his fingers. On both of his hands.
First published in North American Review, 2013, Second place for the James Hearst Poetry Prize
Only
O Heart, this happened, or it did not.
In a room with green walls,
my son was born. The cord was torn
too soon, so his head
was cut off to save his heart. He lived
for a long time.
For a long time there was no breath or cry.
When finally he spoke,
he spoke the wide, whorled leaves of corn.
He spoke the crickets
in clusters beneath the sheaves, he sang
the soil in. He sang the wind
in the dune and hush of ebb tide. Some say
he died. Some say he died.
First published in The Hudson Review, Summer 2013.
Rebecca Foust’s most recent book, Paradise Drive, won the 2015 Press 53 Award for Poetry. Foust was the 2014 Dartmouth Poet in Residence and is the recipient of fellowships from the Frost Place and the MacDowell Colony. New poems are in the Hudson Review, Massachusetts Review, Mid-American Review, North American Review, Omniverse, and other journals, and an essay that won the 2014 Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Award is forthcoming in the Malahat Review.
Rebecca Foust Website
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Reverse Emigration
When I boarded the plane, everyone looked like Uncle Tom
ruddy, some were empurpled
grey hair or auburn in terrier thatches
pale blue of eye
a smidgen of resignation:
the tribe.
I thought We are driving to the interior
I thought, holy god
the airline upholstery
was Kavanagh, Ní Dhomhnaill and Heaney
handwriting. I thought
holy shit, this is the maw.
The maw.
The Boom and After the Boom
The Shannon when it washes
the shoreline in the wake
of a cruiser slurs
exactly like the Polish
language you hear in LIDL
on Friday evenings, seven p.m.
payday. That’s what
Gerry says.❧
The river surface offers
space to the song:
hammer taps of Latvians
and Poles nailing planks
of a deck. The place
between water and sky
holding sound. It is underloved
and an amphitheater.❧
Latvians and Lithuanians
are nailing planks
of grooved decking.
It will be a nice feature
of that riverside property.
! Their tap-tapping
underscores the distance
between this side and that.❧
Winter gales have made swift work
of the billboard proclaiming
42 LUXURY BUNGALOWS ONLY TWO
REMAINING Crumpled up
on the roadside now
two-by-four legs akimbo
a circus-horse curtsy
or steeplechase mishap.
Developers
Greed got in the way. We built a fake estate.
Levinas said to see ourselves we need each other yet
doorbells, rows of them, glow in the night village
a string of lit invitations no elbow has leaned into
(both arms embracing messages). Unanswered
the doors are rotting from the bottom up.
It’s another perplexing pothole in our road, loves.
Hard core from the quarry might make it level,
hard core and cunning speculation into matters
concerning love and doubt, concerning want and plenty.
O the places where pavement runs out and ragwort
springs up, where Lindenwood ends but doesn’t abut
anywhere neatly, a petered-out plot of Tayto tumbleweeds,
binbags, rebar, roof slates, offcuts,
guttering, drain grilles, doodads, infill, gravel !
A not-as-yet nice establishment, possessing potential
where we have no authorised voice but are oddly fitted out
for the pain it takes to build bit by bit.
When the last contractions brought us to the brink
of our new predicament, we became developers.
Geyser
You e-mailed your whole desktop, which is typical
the blue of it Scrovegni chapel blue
a smile I’ve never seen before it is aware of smiling
reveals itself to the camera in the computer.
Squared-off angels, no they are JPEGs, hover
over a faux Polaroid you switched to sepia mode
so I wouldn’t look like a geyser
a river of years to reach such tender self-regard
for a moment you are unencumbered
by the monster critical eye (you meant geezer)
scissored hair blunt and sister-like and merciful
your entire kitchen liquid in the glossy Frigidaire.
It puts me in mind of Fra Angelico, those tricky frescoes
(I seem to translate everything to quattrocento time)
Christ in a blindfold, eyes like poached eggs gazing
down and inward, the gathered regal robes
the marble throne all white and pouring up, yes
like a geyser pouring up while Roman soldiers
unencumbered by their bodies beat and spit and mock.
I have always loved those arrested gestures
the mute green rectangle beautiful as your computer
in Philadelphia where Safari’s compass points
permanently Northeast and the Finder icon smiles
twice and benevolently straight on and in profile.
from Poetry Ireland Review 100 (ed. Paul Muldoon)
Note: Versions of ‘The Boom & After the Boom’, ‘Developers’ and ‘Reverse Emigration’ first appeared in Poetry (Chicago), December 2011. A Poetry Foundation Podcast The Woman Who Quit featuring work by Alice Lyons.Alice Lyons was born in Paterson, New Jersey and has lived in the West of Ireland for fifteen years. Her poems have appeared in publications such as Tygodnik Powszcheny (Kraków) and POETRY (Chicago), as public installations in Staircase Poems at The Dock in Carrick-on-Shannon and as poetry films in cinema and gallery screenings worldwide.
She is the recipient of the Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry, the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary, an Academy of American Poets Award and multiple bursaries in literature and film from An Chomhairle Ealoine/The Arts Council. Her poetry film, The Polish Language, co-directed with Orla Mc Hardy, has screened in competition in over 30 film festivals worldwide and garnered numerous awards including an IFTA nomination. Her new poetry film, Developers, premiered at Oslopoesie, Norway in 2013. She has lectured in English and Fine Art at Boston University, Maine College of Art, the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology and Queen’s University, Belfast. She holds a Ph.D. from the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen’s University, Belfast. She is currently curator of Poetry Now, Dun Laoghaire.
Curator | Poetry Now 2015
Mountains to Sea Book Festival
Dun Laoghaire, County DublinIRELAND
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I was swallowed by a Harry Clark window.
All that flesh. So exquisitely etched.
Decked in magenta, Prussian, cobalt, lemon
even the halos are mandarin. And, oh
so sweet are those cool palms that peek
from viridian pashminas to pray and bless.
I’m on the side altar, reverent, gazing
mouth open, keeping clear of the sacristy
(old habits die hardest) when
the scalding tangerine of Saint John’s robe
pours down my throat. Burnt, I douse my
tongue in a panel of inky night. Graze stars,
how they bite! And bite, and bite…
Fully digested, I stretch
on a glass horizon that peaks like a breast.
Oh, all here is holy, and all here is sex.
I Was Swallowed By A Harry Clarke Window was published by New Irish Writing Magazine
Frida Kahlo
Eyes me from the blue wall of my semi d
in bare necked upbraiding majesty.
How luscious is my pain, she exclaims
and I, can produce it, for you, again and again and again.
Prefer me bleeding in the red dress
or the yellow one? Like a bone for a token?
Just love the way I left absolutely nothing
unspoken? My torment glued to tin votives
for eternity. My pudenda pushing its way
through a bouquet of bad memories.
Pray gringo, pray for me.
Pick me clean but pray for me.
Frida Kahlo was published in The Poetry Bus
The First Time She Painted Me
She done me in my blue dress
She done me in my pale blue dress
and the wall about the door sang blue too
like the breast of a beautiful bird – soar, soar
then I saw the light, the light pour in
thought of church, candles, the Virgin
Mary with a snake underfoot
I saw her smile and move that foot
let the serpent wind round her ankle
till she swooned and dropped the infant
he shattered without a sound.
Oh Mary, said I, what’ll you do now?
Woman, keep your hair on, says the virgin
there’s plenty more where he came from.
The First Time She Painted Me is previously unpublished
Auld Lang’s
Play us an old tune Harvey!
Get on with you Cecil!
Why are all these people in my dream?
Have I died and gone to the BBC?
Is this what god meant by purgatory?
Cut glass accents splintering under hoof?
Ties tight enough to strangle Adams fruit?
And there’s the sweet lord
lifting a Daz white shirt
like a flasher in the park
as dry lips get to grips
with cigars off which
teeny tiny ladies
plunge, flashing
regions nether
and sausage gut
suspenders.
Guts, I’ll have yours for garters
says uncle Toff, as he sucks his teeth
with a short shnup
like a rubber glove
coming off.
And all the men grow pink cheeked and sprout wings,
tiny things, that wouldn’t carry a budgie across a kitchen,
but they rise and rise and their bellies hang sky high,
there must be a dozen or so of them,
overblown milk fed men,
their navels like punctures ready to happen,
and drown us all,
drown us all who waltz
across the parquet floor
paired and in time, mouthing Auld Lang’s Syne
as the piano woman doubles
to set herself against the clock, and the count
(of ten, nine, eight…) down, towards midnight
and I look again and see she’s not bent,
that her spine curves with intent
under the daisy dashed taffeta
hailing down her back,
five, four, three,
the fat men go cerise,
and two, and one,
and the year
bursts open.
Auld Langs was published in The Poetry Bus
Petronella
Sleepless under hotel sheets I summon
the sleeping child pose of my sleeping child
the wild raspberries on the saucer beside him
that tired mother this morning, her twins
sucking slim wedges of melon, those two
tanned magpies who speared all the fruit.
Then Alice’s maid, who preys on my dreams
climbs in, with herb fingers and hot breath
clutching a sack cloth dyed red, whispering
whoever needed a scapegoat as much
as Alice? Four greedy husbands hoping
for the deeds? Step-children planting seeds?
I drift off under thin sheets, sensing poetry
in these walk on parts, the after charge
of a passing heavy goods vehicle
my heart that will someday stop beating.
Note: Petronella was the maid of Alice Kyteler and was burnt as a witch in 1324.
Petronella was published in The Moth Magazine
Night
Blue-black fur skims every part of me that moves
and I move quickly, from mother bed to a maze
of paths, glazed with scattered crumbs of glass.
A creature whose voice I can’t hear, whose face
I can’t see, is teaching me to read with my feet.
This is a time, not to think. Travelling deep
is tough. It’s always winter. No. Love isn’t enough
in the tinker palace of memory. Bird women squawk
overhead, a carnival of forgotten babble.
Baubles swing from their claws, clear spheres
pregnant with sea, moon and sky. They swoop.
Their eyes are yellow with history. Look back!
Who knew there were so many of us? I see beasts
unfettered freaks. Feathered, furred and taking
corners until undergrowth gives way to cliff face.
Blinding sapphire waves break, plunge us
one by one into an amniotic ice blue sea
where we settle to an alert rest. If
you look now, I’m still. Except for a fishy
under-lid flicker. Sleeping. Not
bottom of the ocean, breathing water.
Permeable. Suckling the rushes of some
early second. When a secret runs past
my fingertips, I listen.
Night was published in Southword Literary Journal
Niamh Boyce Niamh Boyce’s novel The Herbalist (Penguin Ireland) won 2013 Newcomer of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. She won Hennessy XO Writer of the Year for her poem Kitty in 2012 and her unpublished poetry collection, The Beast Is Dead, was highly recommended in the 2013 Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award.
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This Feeling
This feeling is a soft, slow touch
A gentle trickle,
A dying ember and a silent whisper
A glistening, glowing light
A haunting melody,
A sad smile and a quiet sigh
This feeling is longing
Love and waiting wrapped as one
The girl by the window
Scanning the wide, still sea
Waiting for her princeBlank Pages
I got a new notebook today
The cover was so bright – shining
And the pages: the highest quality
But it was difficult deciding
Just what to use it for
Part of me didn’t want to use it at all, lest I spoil it
I wanted to fill the pages with something important
That I’d want to keep, and look back on
Wanted to take extra care, so I’d never need to rip out any pages
And then I thought to myself, how much this notebook is like my life
And I still don’t know what to write
And the years are slipping byFestival (To Be Young)
Sweat, on top of dirt, on top of sun burn
Headache from the heat, and a chill
From the cold walk back to the tent, in the dark
Adrenaline in my blood, and a reverberated beat in my chest
Laughter, chatter, and noise
No sleep under the full moon
Many unforgettable memories
This Feeling, Blank Pages and Festival are © Ellie Rose McKeeThis Feeling was originally published in McKee’s first collection of poetry and short stories Still Dreaming.
Ellie Rose McKee is Originally from Bangor in Northern Ireland, Ellie lived in Lincoln, England for three years. Since then she has spent six months living in Oxford and a considerable amount of time travelling elsewhere around the UK. She is the author of Still Dreaming and Wake – collections of poetry and short stories – is currently working as a freelance writer while finishing her first novel, a love story with the working title Rising from Ashes, in her spare time.
Chris Murray 