Category: The Natural World / Climate

“Harbour’s Mouth” and other poems by Annette Skade

February 22nd, 2020

Threnody

I know why the sea churns.

A woman gets the news,
drops to the chair, floor – further,
the quick in her bleeds out.
She is liquid now, leaching away,
this hour, this day, day-on-day.
At the back of her eyes
a face ebbs and flows:
his lop-sided smile makes room
for her touch,
the tilt of his head
calling drinks at the bar,
wide arms swinging his kit,
their young child,
onto working-man shoulders.

Can God breathe underwater?

Each year a sacrifice:
the man in blue overalls,
flower-blue eyes, who loved his wife
at first sight; the ready-laugh man
collecting glasses in the pub
in off times; the dancer
bending into sound like a squall;
the dare-devil larking about
first night back, caught up
in the dizziness of breathing;
the ones who tread water, the ones
who don’t know what hit them,
the ones dragged down
in sight of shore. All lost.

They slipped from sight
like water through our hands;
our hands are empty of them,
our mouths are empty of them,
our chests are hollow,
our eyes are expanses
to search.

Fishermen search. Mates, fathers,
brothers, in-laws, cousins,
make late night calculations
where the body might wash up,
rake inlets and coves
along this torn coastline,
fishboxes are body blows,
spars are pins in their eyes.
On stormy days they are too big
for their own kitchens,
too restless for the hearth,
gaze ever on horizon,
for a break in the weather
to renew the search.

What else is there?

Bringing in the Washing

Rain whips window
like flex,
we break mid-sentence,
head out.
At the side the washing line
takes off
in wild geese formation,
the prop
tethers and leads
the V.

Hands snatch at
shirt flaps
grown strong against grey sea,
shape shifters
we pin by one cuff:
blue cliff,
chough’s wing,
white strand,
creased headland,
tattered island.

We fold them fast into us,
tuck away,
the bundle swells under elbow,
rain-spotted.
And in before they’re soaked,
pile all
on the chair while we finish
our tea.
I take my leave of you -as usual,
arms full.

Harbour’s Mouth

There are people here so much part
of the place that they are named after
headlands. They have the look
of the raw-boned earth about them,
hair the colour of dillisk, eyes taking on
the changing shades of the sea.

The rich morning sun draws us out.
We check the storm’s leavings: pebbles
salt the boreen, bladder wrack drapes
the harbour wall, gobs of sea-spume
float in the air. The Lough is still choppy,
made into peaks by the wind’s flat blade.

Neighbours untie shed doors, clamber
into tractors, hammer fence posts.
The fisherman has been up for hours,
meets me at the pier, a coiled rope in hand.
We talk of the weather, face away from
each other, watching the harbour’s mouth.

Between sheer sides of rock, a glass dam
is piled with boiling layers of saltwater.
Lines of blue and white snap and curl,
lash some high invisible wall,
threatening to shatter whatever power
holds them back. He tells how once

a great wave came thundering, crested
over this broken ring of hills. Came
in the night − 1966 it was − they all heard
the roar of it. He points to a spot up the hill,
a field away, the place where a boat was hurled
that time, hefted by the force of the Atlantic.

Current

The gulf stream makes
a micro-climate here,
nurtures palm trees
and New Zealand ferns.

The current is born
in the isthmus of Mexico,
awash with the energy
of two great Oceans

almost meeting. It leaves
us with a deep-rooted thrill,
like the quick intake
at the glimpse of a lover,

flip in the gut as hands nearly touch,
breath exchanged between mouths.

Meeting William Blake in the Library 1980

Unfinished. I hold
the weight of paper,
the lightest sketch,
a man in a crown,
clown’s hat,
hair streaming.

Wonder came first.
The tip of the brush
found its place,
dropped wild yellow
to leap from the head
over pencil strokes,

onto page after page
on this serviceable desk,
to skim along roads,
cover the sleeping child,
charge the muscles of man,
stars and moon.

A grain of colour
rubs off on my hand,
passes over time
into bloodstream,
works its way up
slowly to my soul.

Annette Skade is from Manchester and has lived on the Beara peninsula, West Cork, Ireland for many years. She is currently in her final year of a PhD on the work of Canadian poet Anne Carson at Dublin City University. Her poetry collection Thimblerig was published following her receipt of the Cork Review Literary Manuscript prize in 2012. She has been published in various magazines in Ireland, the U.K., the U.S. and Australia and has won and been placed in several international poetry competitions.

⊗Annette Skade

A Celebration of Poetry for International Women’s Day 2020

February 21st, 2020
Papyrus Fragment

It darts, bares a blaze
of underwing to plain sight;
this endless fragile need
to make a mark,
to come to light

Papyrus Fragment is © Annette Skade

‘Secrets of a cartographer’s wife’ by Katrina Dybzynska

The cartographer’s wife never told him
about her contributions to his maps.
A few tiny islands hidden in the middle
of an archipelago in the name of symmetry.
Some borderline moved to resemble
a face shape. The territory of England shortened
slightly, in personal revenge.

One time, she renamed an insignificant river
in Bangladesh after her lover. She felt pity
for the cartographer that he was more furious
about the affair than about her intervention
in the world order. She knew that romances
were ephemeral, while naming things
was changing them forever.

Katrina Dybzynska poet, shortlisted for Red Line Poetry Prize 2019. Author of „Dzień, w którym decydujesz się wyjechać” (The Day When You Decide To Leave), Grand Prix of Rozewicz Open Contest 2017. Laureate of national competitions in Poland. She has been publishing short stories, concept book, science fiction, reportage, and poetry, but feels most attracted to genre hybrids. Polish Non-Fiction Institute graduate. Activist. Currently a member of Extinction Rebellion Ireland.

‘Correnti’ by Viviana Fiorentino

Ora è questo un manto di alghe e sale
sotto il vento atlantico
o è corrente marina del fondo
della mia vita e della tua vita
ora è sogno o perla luccicante.

‘Currents’ (English trans. by Maria McManus)

This is a shawl of salt and seaweed
against the Atlantic wind
the ocean currents on the sea bed
of my life, your life
a dream, a burnished pearl.

Correnti /Currents © Viviana Fiorentino, english trans by Maria McManus

Viviana Fiorentino was born in Italy. After obtaining a PhD, she travelled across Europe, from Switzerland to Germany, England and finally to Belfast where she teaches Italian Literature. Since 2018 she has taken part to literature festivals in Italy and in Ireland. She was involved in the poetry project ‘LabeLLit’. She has been awarded or mentioned in various Italian poetry prizes (i.e. Arcipelago Itaca Edizioni & Bologna in Lettere Dislivelli). Her poems appear on Litblogs, international magazines (Brumaria, Works #9’, 2018) and in the Arcipelago Itaca Anthology of Italian contemporary poets. In 2019 she published her poetry collection In giardino (‘In the garden’) for Controluna Press and her first novel Tra mostri ci si ama (lit. trasl. ‘Monsters love each other’) for Transeuropa Press.

Maria McManus lives in Belfast. She is the author of Available Light (Arlen House, 2018), We are Bone (2013), The Cello Suites (2009) and Reading the Dog (2006) (Lagan Press), she has collaborated extensively with others to put literature into public spaces. She is the artistic director and curator of Poetry Jukebox and an active organiser and founder member of Fired! Irish Poets.

‘Genetics’ by Roberta Beary

Your eyes are big and round like your father’s

but while his are the color of the Irish Sea

yours are the color of the muddy fields

on my father’s land

fit only for the peasants who worked them.

abortion day
a shadow flutters
the fish tank

Publication credit: Rattle #47, Spring 2015 (ed. Timothy Green)

Roberta Beary identifies as gender-expansive and writes to connect with the disenfranchised, to let them know they are not alone. She is the author of Deflection (Accents, 2015), nothing left to say (King’s Road Press, 2009) and The Unworn Necklace (Snapshot Press, 2007, 5th ed. 2017) which was a finalist in the Poetry Society of America annual book awards. Beary is the editor of the haiku anthologies Wishbone Moon (Jacar Press, 2018), fresh paint (Red Moon Press, 2014), 7 (Jacar Press, 2013), dandelion clocks (HSA, 2008) and fish in love (HSA, 2006). Her work appears in Rattle, KYSO Flash, Cultural Weekly, 100 Word Story, and Haiku In English The First Hundred Years (Norton, 2013). Beary’s work has been nominated for Best of the Net and multiple Pushcart Prizes. She lives in County Mayo, Ireland where she edits haibun for the journal Modern Haiku.

‘Dying Lover’ by Anora Mansour

Trace my lips
In low whispers
As I once wept psalms
over my dying lover.

Threaten that man
You will murder for me –
For my heart
is a cadence of silence.

I can only love you
if you creep through this life
dangling dangerously
as a ravenous red kite.

When we both
become one lonesome night.
And rub up to love up as a fight.

Oh, how I might love you,
bitter citron basket on my lap
Slumberly trusting me as a child.
I would open my thighs to you – a snap trap.

Perhaps then you could open the universe for me.

BY ANORA MANSOUR
© 2020

Anora Mansour is a graduate of the University of Oxford. She lives between Oxford and Dublin. She has been published in a collection of Jazz Poems, various online sites, and has her own published collection of poetry and blog. She is African-American and Irish.

‘Clutch’ by JLM Morton

for h.l.

in the nest of my fist, a fledgling
scooped up from the lane

her soft unfinished beak
her shining eye
a buoy ringing in the green cathedral of trees

a single yellow feather wisps across my knuckle
there is a twitch of elephant digits

and I think about keeping her

raising her as my own
feeding her worms

but I let her go

chirring for the ones I could not save.

JLM Morton lives in Gloucestershire, England, snatching as much time as she can to write between caring for a young family, renovating a house and staring up the barrel of a demanding day job. Her first set of poems was recently published by Yew Tree Press for the Stroud Poets Series and she is currently working on a collection.

Website URL: jlmmorton.com

from ‘Grieving with the Animals’ by Polly Roberts

Though the civility of civilisation frightens me, I visit somewhere populated.
A graveyard made squirrel territory. One squirrel for every gravestone.
They mount lichen-covered peaks and keep lookout.
They claim the trees, the abandoned church.
Nobody will make them leave.

That night, I dreamt the answer to the universe.
It was blue,
inside a conch shell. Spiraling
in and out of crystal moments.
Eggshell blue.
In and out of images of the hospital bed,
and these dreams.

Polly Roberts grew up in Devon. Three years studying Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia left her with an inextricable link to the landscape, compelling her to continue to write about the creatures and habitats encountered there.

Observations of both the non-human and human world continued whilst living on a houseboat on the River Avon near Bristol while completing her MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.

Polly has run creative writing workshops for refugees, detainees, and young people and curated two exhibitions in response to her writing, both displayed at the Norwich Arts Centre.

In 2018, the British Council awarded Polly a Writers by Nature scholarship, during which she wrote this debut poetry collection, Grieving with the Animals. ( 2019, Dempsey and Windle)

‘Beochaoineadh Máthar Maoise’ by Ellen Nic Thomás

A dhílleachta linbh gan ainm, gan athair,
Do chraiceann ar aondath le humha an nathair,
A lúbann timpeall do thaobhán uiríseal,
Mar bhata ceannródaí is sníomhanna sisil.

Is trua liom ciseán do dhóchas a fhíochán,
Do dhán a chaitheamh i bpoll an duibheagáin,
D’eiseadh a chruthú ar bhunús baill séire,
‘Nois tá tú chomh cotúil leis an gCailleach Bhéarra.

A iníon, a mhiceo, a ógfhlaith bocht,
A leanbh truaillithe, maith dom mo locht,
Imigh anois leat, ná bí do mo chrá,
Le smaointe ciúinchiontacha ó mhaidin go lá.

Ellen Nic Thomás is a bilingual poet from Dublin. She graduated from Trinity College with a BA in English and Irish. Her work has been published by headstuff.org, Tales From the Forest and The Attic.
```
'On watching a lemon sail the sea' by Maggie Harris

1
and I’m singing ‘You are my sunshine’ thinking 
of my childhood across the sea of incubation
go Honey go
you self-contained cargo ship you
with your sealed citrus juices and pitted panacea of seeds
braving the collision of tankers and illicit submarines

                 they called me scurvy.       the lemonade
                 my mother made was iced and sprinkled with
                                           Demerara
 (of course) 

and I’m wondering, did they grow you there, o lemon     mine            
you
for your juices
a lemon plantation, not to be confused with
a plantain plantation even a banana just don’t mention sugar
stack you in the gloom like hereto mentioned bananas
green and curtailed in their growing  or even
those force-ripe mangoes with girls’ names
nobody knows here and who leave their sweetness behind
bare-assed on the beaches
come
to the marketplace
comatose.

I do not remember lemons, but limes.

        
       M
    I         E
L                S.

Piled high in their abundance. Limes.
Acid green pyramids on market pavements
holding their secrets beneath their reptilian skins.

And there is my aunt, her arms thin as bamboo
gathering the fallen from the yard, sweeping
their dried leaves into the remembrance of herself
whilst the black maid slips slivers of lemon into a split
-bellied fish whose eyes glaze up at the sun.

‘Gauguin, you can come in now; remember Martinique ...?
hue the native in all her harnessed beauty
the slack –jawed fish, browning blood
the textured landscape in shades of  pawpaw and indigo.’
          
But, liming is what my lemon is doing now, 
(in the West Indian sense), hey ho
over the waves at Aberporth, there he blows.


2
I set you free  
to take to the sea again 
on a high tide, with breakers rushing the beach
like warriors.
They pummel the sand, scythe
a four foot chasm into the mouth
of a lonely river
beat the rocks’ submerged heads
batter the cliffs again 
                                        and again
                                                     and again.
The sea, beyond its charge, was waiting -
a winter morning sea, a Twelfth Night sea
tumultuous and moody

                                       waiting.

A strange gift, you
a large, perfect lemon
fresh and sharp as the sun-bright
wind-cut winter’s day. But I
unsure of your heritage
refused you. 


3
Dear Voyager,
I cupped you
in my palm
desire urging my possession 
how easy it would be – a lemon drizzle cake
a Martini iced, an accompaniment
to plaice or sole – and here I am playing with words
the resonance of belonging, of immortality –
but the devil played tricks with my mind
an injection of poison perhaps, a needle prick
into your  pristine, nobbled skin – but we are running ahead here
thinking of cargo – you may simply have fallen from a Tesco
carrier bag whose owner, fearing a lonesome home-coming
went walking on these very sands contemplating - life.

But there you were anyway, settled on the sand like a crab
then comfortable in the palm of my hand.
                                                      

4
Finders are not necessarily keepers. Some
will do well to remember that. Vixens
circling misunderstood husbands in bars. Frag
ments from the fallen.
Oh but, how strong is the desire
to hold close, keep tight
smother your darling, your little nut-baby
in soft gloves, hard love, the kind that makes
you want to bite, bite! Rip flesh and bone. Swallow.
                     I could have accepted
your sacrifice
that gift of yourself, thank the universe
for its benevolence.
But the universe is not benevolent.
Stars are exploding missiles in a panther-black night.
Saturn doesn’t give two fucks. It’s chaos
out there.
But I guess you didn’t have time
for star-gazing in your ocean-going lumbering
over the hey-ho waves. And if I had sunk my vampiric teeth
into the you of you, you would be no more 
than a bitter taste, a withering lump of citrus
on my kitchen table. Far better to remember you
the obsidian walnut weight of you
and these questions you have gifted me
and that last sight of you 
rolling away on the tide.
```
Maggie Harris is a Guyanese writer living in the UK. She has twice won The Guyana Prize for Literature and was Regional Winner of the Commonwealth Short Story prize 2014, with ‘Sending for Chantal’.
She has worked for Kent Arts and Libraries, Kent University and Southampton University as International Teaching Fellow.

Maggie Harris Site URL: http://www.maggieharris.co.uk
International Women’s Day, RASCAL and AV Links
- International Women’s Day 2020 Site URL: https://www.internationalwomensday.com/
- RASCAL Archive URL:http://www.rascal.ac.uk/institutions/fired-irish-women-poets-and-canon
- “A Figure of Speech” by JLM Morton (AV)
- An Index of Women Poets
- Contemporary Irish Women Poets

“Reincarnation of tired beings” and other poems by Katrina Dybzynska

February 8th, 2020

Secrets of a cartographer’s wife

The cartographer’s wife never told him
about her contributions to his maps.
A few tiny islands hidden in the middle
of an archipelago in the name of symmetry.
Some borderline moved to resemble
a face shape. The territory of England shortened
slightly, in personal revenge.

One time, she renamed an insignificant river
in Bangladesh after her lover. She felt pity
for the cartographer that he was more furious
about the affair than about her intervention
in the world order. She knew that romances
were ephemeral, while naming things
was changing them forever.

Reincarnation of tired beings

In my next life I want to become a German
couple in their retirement, in a fitted camper.
Him, steering confidently through the round
-abouts and telling the same jokes for the last 30 years.

Her, reading paper maps and navigating
the playlist, suggesting a small parallel road
as they will believe themselves adventurous,
trying local dishes, carrying beer from home.

I used to think that I aimed to be a hacker,
but in fact, I strove to be a virus –
a threat beyond miscommunication,
ever-transforming, so closest to survival.

Or, I would settle on the life of a solar panel,
reduced to basic energies, dutifully
absorbing light, left in the middle
of the desert, shining hope for the future.

Development

Our child would have uneven
teeth and a birthmark on the right
hip. The rest would be a fight
for domination: eyes that change

color, like mine, when I am happy,
or yours so black that it is impossible
to distinguish them from pupils?
Yours curly or mine straight?

Maybe, it would love spicy food
after me, or have a pepper-allergy
like its father. I wonder if it could
still choose its food.

Would it inherit your pure as seagull’s
laughter or the one with a hidden question
mark like mine? Would there still
be seagulls for reference? Most importantly:
would it have lots of reasons to laugh?

Hopefully, it would get skin
after you as it is more resistant
to heat. But you disagree as my skin
color is more resistant to humans.

You think that it would see connections
and that we would teach it to protect
nature. Before I leave, I respond
that by then there might not be much left
to protect.

Love Emergence

How do you know that you are in love?
My little sister asked our grandmother,
because she remembers to respects elders
even if their idea of a “date” is to watch
the same soap opera for the past 30 years,
still arguing about that 6754th episode
where Ridge nearly cheats on Brooke.
– If you have grandkids with him, probably
it is love, grandma replied, which I did not find
particularly helpful for a 17 y.o.

How do you know that you are in love?
My sister demanded from our mother
because l had taught her to always look for a second
opinion. I also told her to choose her experts
carefully and our mother, three divorces
and each child with a different father,
might not be the perfect pick for the subject.
– Does he make you laugh, my mum asked.
Because that is the only way to go through
hardships. Yet, I do not believe in the existence of
the Joke that would save my parents’ marriage.

How do you know that you are in love?
My sister, that I never called half-sister
as there is nothing half, nor genetic.
About love came to me finally. She is clever
saving the best for last. And all I was able to advise her
was to talk to him about climate break-down.
If he makes you feel safe even when he says he is scared,
Not in the “everything will be alright” meaningless way,
but in seeing more connections than one heart
could ever love, if he makes you feel at home,
even when the home is on fire,
this must be it.

The tipping point

Two human pregnancies, or one of an elephant,
white rhino, orca or a killer whale.

The time that takes for bamboo to grow 498 meters,
or for your hair to be 22.5 centimeters longer.

The period needed to write The Jungle Book,
or to cross the Sahara by camel, and return.

If it was a baby, by then it would learn to refer to itself
by name, echo what people say, and – what is comforting –
understand 10 times more than it can put into words.

18 months.
Can we transform the whole world of interwoven links
in a time it takes to decompose a cigarette?

Katrina Dybzynska poet, shortlisted for Red Line Poetry Prize 2019. Author of „Dzień, w którym decydujesz się wyjechać” (The Day When You Decide To Leave), Grand Prix of Rozewicz Open Contest 2017. Laureate of national competitions in Poland. She has been publishing short stories, concept book, science fiction, reportage, and poetry, but feels most attracted to genre hybrids. Polish Non-Fiction Institute graduate. Activist. Currently a member of Extinction Rebellion Ireland.

Billy Mills reviews ‘bind’ at Elliptical Movements

December 23rd, 2019

Christine Murray is well-known as a champion of women poets via her Poethead blog and the Fired! project. It would be all too easy for this activity to obscure the fact that Murray is a poet in her own right, and on the evidence of bind: a waking book that would be a real pity. It’s a book in five sections, each consisting of short named or numbered poems that trace overlapping natural and temporal processes: the day, the seasons, the unfurling of a leaf, the pun on ‘waking’ in the subtitle, as both mourning and morning. The poems imagistic, fragmentary and echo the tensile logopoeia of Mina Loy:

cinquefoil the amberlight
purelit / renders in ‘leaf’
|unfurls|

fur, not claw,
can rend her nets
laid-out-on-grass.

(from ‘Dawn’)

Murray uses spacing and typography to serious effect, with a special focus on the use of the pipe symbol and italics and faint or greyed fonts as devices to (de)emphasise fragments of text, as in this couplet from the ‘Dawn’ sequence:

winter is a hard place,
winter is a hard place.

But the most striking aspect of the book, to me at least, is her use of pronouns. The third person dominates, with ‘my’ appearing occasionally and ‘I’ not until the last few pages. The effect is to decentre or even deny the speaking voice as medium for the poems. In fact, the predominant pronoun is she/her and this female third person is frequently identified, directly or otherwise, with the natural world:

she awaits yellow spring
willow is the first to don her light-robes

a tree,
plain and ordinary.

(from ‘willow’s’)

The image of the fallen leaf, and specifically the recurring phrase ‘a leaf fallen is always a poem’, lends an autumnal, almost mournful, tone to the book that might be seen as appropriate in this era of ecological crisis, but Murray is not a bleak pessimist, it seems, and images of spring and of the rising sun point to a cautious optimism. Not that Murray is intent on using nature as symbol; her focus is on the world as-is:

the
actual bird,
the image of a bird

the real thing of it
grasps onto a branch.

And the result of this focus is one of the more interesting books of Irish ecopoetry I’ve read recently. Read all 6 Turas Press reviews at Elliptical Movements. Thank you Billy for such a sensitive reading of bind.

“Curlew” and other poems by Rosalin Blue

December 8th, 2019

Lonesome Occupation

Up – up and away
in my little studio
under the sky
drawn back alone
– to write

That loneliness
is the room for concentration
bears the space for inspiration
strikes the key of motivation
to create origination
with insane illumination
and a wild determination,
the poetic flow in motion
— oh that cosmic emanation
for the sake of word-elation

Yet, it requires segregation
and at times I miss emotion
wishing for some conversation
and a mutual revelation.
So I leave my elevation
seeking true communication
and some closer stimulation
—far beyond my meditation
of obsessive rhyme-creation

And when that space inside
of emphatic animation
and ecstatic evocation
with the strange amalgamation
of expansion and sensation,
that poetic incantation
that orgasmic culmination
fills me up to saturation,
then I get the urgent notion
to fulfill my true vocation

And again I draw back
to my lonesome destination
up – up and away
in my little studio
under the sky

— to write

Under the Silvermoon

And how often am I looking up with longing gaze
to your window high above under the silvermoon
where your sweet body lies already in the warm duvets
when inside me with desire now the night awakes

In many hours when the moonlight travels through the dark
and the muse of poems binds me in a writing trance
my tender feeler-cells are all consumed
in longing for the touch from your gentle hands

And my senses wander further down along your flanks
until with yearning quiver – when my night is done
I quietly can nestle to your supple curves at last
and disappear in bliss to sleep under the silvermoon

— And my desire is waiting for another night.

Unterm Silbermond

Und wie oft sehe ich mit sehnsuchtsvollem Blick
hinauf zu Deinem Fenster unterm Silbermond,
wo schon Dein süßer Körper warm in Kissen ruht,
wenn voll Verlangen erst in mir die Nacht erwacht.

Zu mancher Stunde, wenn das Mondlicht durch das Dunkel zieht
und mich die Dichtermuse in den Schreibwahn bannt,
verzehren meine zarten Fühlerzellen sich
vor Sehnsucht nach Berührung Deiner sanften Hand

Und meine Sinne wandern weiter Deine Flanken lang
bis mit ersehntem Beben ich – wenn meine Nacht getan,
mich leis an Deine weichen Kurven schmiegen kann
und selig unterm Silbermond in Schlaf entschwinde –

— Und mein Verlangen wartet auf die nächste Nacht.

Curlew

You tell me
of the call of the curlew
Its curling cry haunting
through the bogland
How it weaved through
the mornings of your childhood
How it echoed through
the darkness of your nights

The curlew’s call has fallen silent
over the years gone by
The mottled messenger stolen
as the numbers of birds
migrating the wetlands
drained now and laid dry
have from hundreds plunged
sheer into near extinction

The curlew’s trilling song
the melody of coastlines
harmony of the island
has gone quiet with the winds
The seeker of the sand
leaves behind a land
void of music luring
the boy in the evening sun

You mourn the echoless silence
in the mornings of your prime
No slender legs stalking the plains
or stoking mud with curving bill
No curlew calling evermore
the empty coastline still
Nothing more than a memory
left behind at the end of dusk

Metal

After we invented the wheel
we learned how to melt the metals
from the rock, and the gold-rush
began, as we dug and drained
all the gleaming precious treasures
from the veins of the Earth,
forging jewels, coins and wealth,
hoarding them like magpies.

Red hot, like liquid fire flowing,
a crimson burning river glowing,
molten copper, iron, silver
slither smoothly through the grooves,
pouring into casting cauldrons,
shooting into foundry molds,
smouldering, steaming – zosh
the streaming gold is cast to form.

We made tools from the new metals
and axes for slaughtering trees
and arrowheads for felling animals.
We made ploughs to sow the seeds
and blades to cut the deeds
and steal the riches from the land
and rightful owners, and we cast
our wildest dreams into reality.

Then we made dooming cannonballs
to cast on human enemies
and iron bars to capture freedom.
Our bullets pierce through history,
reeling round the golden throne,
our babel titans slice the skies
and we’ve made drills to bore
the very bedrock of our waters.

Now hard and cold our steel-towns
gleam in the sunlight like blue ice.
The shimmery promise of gold
holds the core to precious pride.
But the price of power was high
and now the golden calf is sold!
And our hearts like bloody swords
from wealth and greed are growing cold

Beyond compare we hoard and kill
like magpies – merciless as steel.
And the glowing stream of gold
from liquid fire freezes cold
and our hearts become the stone
that once we dug out of the ground
from the gleaming veins of Earth –
blinded by the promise from Her core.

We are Receivers

Staring into the night
eyes fixed hard
on the bridge in the dim light
until the mind cannot understand
the image any longer

Repeating a word – repeat repeat
so often that to the ear
it loses its meaning
becoming a mantra
of higher consciousness

Chanting the Om
until we rise from lightless night
benighted mind filling
until aglow with the potential
that is the eternal light

Seeing the Ocean of love
and the breath halts
the heart spreads its wings
and the tongue
knows no words

We are receivers
of a brighter light
than our eye can ever see
nor our mind can ever conceive
But our hearts can feel

Quiet I stand
in the stillness of the Divine
the brightness of love
the silence of awe

Curlew and other poems © Rosalin Blue

Rosalin Blue is a cultural scientist, translator, and poet who began performing in 1995 in Hildesheim, Germany. Linked to the literary scene in Ireland since 2000, her poetic home is O Bhéal in Cork. She has performed in Cork City and County, Limerick, Galway, and Dublin, and at festivals like the Electric Picnic and the LINGO Spoken Word Festival. Blue’s poems have been published in Southword and the Five Words Volumes in Cork, Revival Poetry, Stanzas in Limerick, and in Crannóg Magazine, Galway. She has been included in two Cork Anthologies, On the Banks (2016) and A Journey Called Home (2018). Her poetry collection In the Consciousness of Earth was published by Lapwing, Belfast in 2012, and her translation of love-poetry by the German Expressionist August Stramm You. Lovepoems & Posthumous Love Poems came out in 2015. Find her on Youtube and facebook.

‘Three Red Things’ by C. Murray

November 12th, 2019

Poethead by Chris Murray

Three Red Things
the three red things are:
a red umbrella with a black lace trim
spoke-shattered it belongs to my mother,
does not match my abstract and faux
snaky blouson jacket,
Alfred Schütze’s The Enigma of Evil
a memento-mori from his old library,
its red cover is rain-glued-sodden.
I bind myself to a tree,
a shopping bag, berry-red
not much to say about it
is the third red thing.
And I am in the park,
moulded to the body of a tree
its roots are moving beneath my feet.
I am afraid it will tear up from the
soil’s hungry drinking as,
form crystallises
assumes its
almost shape,
within the silica of
this holding-skin,
beneath crystal swipe
and tungsten-lunge
into the exact point
and drain,
then seep
from the vessel-encasement,
not sustainer.
Form crystallises
until
form becomes
a stone dress
press-to
drop-by-drop
raindrop-and-sinew
the whole woman
not tamp-in
onto…

View original post 110 more words

“Dive of the Kingfisher” and other poems by Ria Collins

October 13th, 2019

Dance of the Samurai

I danced in my Communion dress
barefoot dervish
mother read aloud from Illustrated Poetry,
I found my plastic sword.

I dreamt I was a samurai
lived at the foot of Mt.Fuji,
wore armour and mask
raven hair in a top-knot.

Princess Tsuru, daughter of Ochi Clan.
I practiced the Five Rings Of The Sword,
meditated and studied
the way of the warrior.

Father transformed an old camogie stick
to a majestic Naginata sword.
Grandmother gave me a gold silk skirt,
jacket of azure velvet
with extended shoulder wings.
I wrapped black calico around my waist
and placed my sword in the Obi.

At school, I carved a mask of such ferocity
teacher placed it in a bag,
told me to carry it home.

Now, in the evenings, I put on my wedding dress,
let folds fall over hidden scars,
I lengthen the woven rope
feed it slowly towards him, and wait.

My mask slips down. I prepare for war.

Dive of the Kingfisher

I am tired of being a woman
suckled and torn from childbirth and men,
hands wrinkled from years submerged,
I clasp at dreams that trickle through the plughole.
Forgotten, uncoffined. I must wait.

I am tired of grinding cumin,
coriander, mustard, and cardamom
while I taste only emptiness.
Children loved and well-fed have left,
I move from person to person.

I shoulder the clouds of my mother,
blackened January,
rain falls inward, time contracts,
chalk bones, weightless, skinless,
unseen madness in colourless veins.

A sparrow of small movements
I move around crumbs, claws light
ready to dance through the sky.
I should be a bird
a thing of beauty.

Perhaps a kingfisher,
with azure underbelly
cloaked with emerald wings,
a brilliant blue flash
across the Universe.

Elegy to some Mysterious Form

From Katy in Dublin to Ruby in Liverpool

Misshapen walnut
nestled hard against my palm,
as I searched for your soul
in pitted holes.

I looked for a connection
to your core,
all I saw was
mismatched joints, a jellied eel
of jumbled vertebrae.

I held your flaccid nothingness,
soft against the dampness of exertion,
translucent beads like tears
dropping from my skin.

Should we wrap you tenderly
in love and lace,
or allow you to be sluiced
In some unknown place?
I do not regret
housing your short journey.
please try to understand.

When they informed me
of incompatibility,
my body spilled,
the severed cord
my decision.

Now the jagged space
blurs without sides
where you should be,
you haunt my melodies
with your legacy.

I see you in some mysterious form,
tall and proud, watching us.
exotic plumes, unruffled,
having waged a war
of constitutional law,
about our rights
but what of yours?

You left us here to wonder.

No Survivors

Translucent shadings, surfacing gut thrusts
which threatened to choke
their broken promises.
It had to stop.

Lost in make-believe, she was cold,
hardened as ice-cubes,
used up tulips returning to the soil,
or curled magazines yellowed with time.

He never faltered, dull ink-coloured
the crushed bloom of her dreams,
no milk or honey to soothe
saltwater dabbed on the ache.

Friends safely distanced, children cowered,
insulted in his world of men,
his dammed silt anger –
she, his punch-bag.

She fought for a job, trialed escape –
sick-days, unhealed wounds
bones protruding through the stretched skin,
always in denial of one-way dialogue.

Sun glinted on flint through glass,
she grabbed her chance, danced around a shadow,
left hand raised in defence as he sniggered
the air bent blue.

In her cell, stone wrapped retreat,
memory dimmed, she stares through the edge
a closed loss, broken children in care.
– no survivors.

No glory, just burn of pain
but she loves him still.
Long before the beginning
there was going to be an end.

To Rothko

I would like a lover like you
concise, with depths of colour,
a definite touch
to reach the heart in me,
brush me with strokes,
urge me outside myself
until my breath gasps.

You would show me
how form subsides then soars
from cobalt to violet
crimson to gold
a tightrope between worlds,
absorb all fear and thought
in a perfectly formed frame.

Feet firmly planted on wood, unshaken
like a tai-chi stance,
“as above so below”.
A white line spills across canvas,
in the centre, stillness.

The Stanhopea and the Mexican Boys

In the shade of a tropical garden
under a sherbet sky,
the Stanhopea orchid stretches
purple daubed petals
emitting its scent,
vanilla and chocolate peppermint.

Hundreds of orchid bees
lured from twenty feet
by two blood maroon eye spots
beneath the belly of the sepals
suck the essence for propagation
in the sweet seduction to follow.

Twenty yards away
in parched streets,
young boys caught, waving guns,
drawn to crimson sorrow,
fall with a kiss of gunshot
while the Barons watch.

The Stanhopea ripens,
in one short burst.
Like the Barons the bees will leave
when the petals fall.

“Dive of the Kingfisher” and other poems © Ria Collins

Ria Collins worked as Director of Nursing for many years. Now living in Galway, she has read at Clifden Arts Festival and Galway Library open mic events. She has been published in Skylight 2016, shortlisted for Over the Edge New Writer of the Year 2016 and longlisted in 2017. She was shortlisted for Poems for Patience 2017 and in 2018. She attended workshops in Galway with Kevin Higgins and Dublin Writers Centre with Mark Granier, Jessica Traynor and Adam Wyeth. Most recently she has performed a collaboration of her work with music at the Cuirt International Festival of literature 2018.

“Animals are in Communion” and other poems by Polly Roberts

September 20th, 2019

Animals are in Communion

I came home

to find him

doing nothing.

Limp armed.

Could do nothing.

Sat on the sofa

lost to the world.

I have some bad news

I’ve been seeing ghosts. Birds on water.

The day before I received the news, two swans flew low over my head. Their
wings thrummed like a helicopter.

Eyes turned to watch the rescue vehicle, and instead saw white bellies.
The sound travelled, nothing like their usual flapping, as they soared over and onto water.

Returning to my boat, a shadow shifted on the river bank. A furry creature – small, sleek – edged
its way through the grass, took a moment to drink, then slop, slipped in.

Animals are in communion for you.

As are we,

nosing each other’s armpits

as we bed in

for warm companionship.

Because you went cold.

Though the civility of civilisation frightens me, I visit somewhere populated.
A graveyard made squirrel territory. One squirrel for every gravestone.
They mount lichen-covered peaks and keep lookout.
They claim the trees, the abandoned church.
Nobody will make them leave.

That night, I dreamt the answer to the universe.
It was blue,
inside a conch shell. Spiraling
in and out of crystal moments.
Eggshell blue.
In and out of images of the hospital bed,
and these dreams.

Polly Roberts grew up in Devon. Three years studying Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia left her with an inextricable link to the landscape, compelling her to continue to write about the creatures and habitats encountered there.

Observations of both the non-human and human world continued whilst living on a houseboat on the River Avon near Bristol while completing her MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.

Polly has run creative writing workshops for refugees, detainees, and young people and curated two exhibitions in response to her writing, both displayed at the Norwich Arts Centre.

In 2018, the British Council awarded Polly a Writers by Nature scholarship, during which she wrote this debut poetry collection, Grieving with the Animals.( 2019, Dempsey and Windle)

The Blue Hare (An Giorria Gorm) and other poems by Jackie Gorman

June 12th, 2019

The Blue Hare

Stepping off the path,
a silver car rushes by.
I never saw it coming,
yet I felt the ground give way.
I knelt down within myself.

The hare that lives in my mind,
snug in her thick coat and
safe in her wide-open eyes,
breaks free and runs across me.

She purrs, sniffs my body,
looks up, pisses and moves on.
So it happens that I am reborn
into my warm russet fur and strong legs.

Mountain hare, white hare,
Irish hare, blue hare.
Many names, one thumping spirit.

A hare will not move until it has to,
stillness and camouflage its defence,
safe in its form of flattened earth.

What does it mean to be free?
Hare breath touching the ribs.
Watching everything going still,
galloping through swirls of thyme,
sedge and gorse.

An Giorria Gorm

Faoi choiscéim den teach
tiomáineann carr gheal faoi dheifir.
Ní fhaca mé ag teacht é,
ach baineadh croitheadh as an talún.
Téim síos ar mo ghlúine
i mo chroí istigh.

An giorria a mhaireann i m’intinn,
soiprithe ina cóta tiubh agus
sábháilte ina súile lonracha,
scaoileann sí saor agus ritheann sí tharam.

Crónaíonn sí, bolaíonn sí mo chorp,
breathnaíonn sí suas, múnann sí
agus bogann sí ar aghaidh.
Athbheirthe isteach i m’fhionnadh
donnrua te agus mo chosa láidre.

Giorria sléibhe, giorria bán,
giorria Éireannach, giorria gorm,
anam fuadach amháin.

Anáil ghiorria, lámh ar na heasnacha
ag fanacht go socair, cosa in airde
trí guairneán cuilithe de tím chreige,
clab chumhra agus aiteann.

The Wolves of Chernobyl

Silent and spectral, the wolves of Chernobyl now eat fruit and herbs.
They chomp down with their meat cleaver mouths on black night-shade.
They enjoy its bitter taste after the juicy haunch of a deer.
Breathless from the speed of the hunt,
they barely notice the stubborn old women who refuse to leave.
The women now make Cherry Vodka for Christmas in a radio-active forest.

Scientists tracked one wolf leaving the exclusion zone.
Its GPS collar broadcasted its last location,
before the battery died.
Then the wolf vanished from the map with a beep.
I dream of it still, eating foxberries and crab apples.
It seems unaware of the heritage it carries,
as it walks towards us with its cunning smile.
Yet, I welcome him warmly because he has endured.

Field Notes – If Grief Were a Mammal

If grief were a mammal, its eyes would be large and hungry, like a bear at the end of Winter. It would often be hunted and fearful and because of this, it could turn on you in an instant. Its fur would not be sleek but tired and ragged.

On Summer days, it would swim beside you in the lake, shy and curious, gulping water in its broad muzzle. It would be self-aware because of a neocortex full of tricks – singing, scent-marking and using tools. The bones in its inner ear would transmit sound vibrations, so it would be able to hear the memories you would whisper. A single-boned lower jaw would give it a powerful bite, allowing it to cut and grind.

Oxygen-rich blood in its four-chambered heart would keep it strong. It would have breasts heavy with milk but no offspring to feed. This would cause you to write in your notebook with an exclamation mark – mammal from the Latin “mamma” meaning breast! How cruel is nature.

With its ursine warmth, grief would mostly be nocturnal. Street lights would let you admire the play of light and dark on its coat. Without you knowing, it would stalk you for a long time. It would smell you in the wind. It would have vulpine intelligence, feline agility and lupine strangeness. It would come to recognise you, even from a great distance. It would run to you, as soon as you approach. Hunger could be part of this apparent affection. No animal could ever be more faithful or devoted.

Jackie Gorman has been published in a number of journals including Poetry Ireland Review, The Lonely Crowd and The Honest Ulsterman. She was part of the 2017 Poetry Ireland Introductions Series and won the 2017 Listowel Writers’ Week Single Poem Award and was commended in the Irish Poem of the Year Award at the Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Awards in the same year. She recently completed a Masters in Poetry Studies at Dublin City University. Her first collection was published by the UK poetry publisher The Onslaught Press in May 2019.

“Clutch” and other poems by JLM Morton

June 8th, 2019

Hex

without her, his gut
is like a hag stone at high water
craving for the sea

Voyeur

For weeks I pass the affair, on the turn
from common tarmac to unclassified track,
where shorthorns lap at the galvanised trough,
gliders rise on the ivied beech.

A people carrier parks in the lay-by
limestone creamed to the mudguards, the wheels,
the egg of his head tips back on the rest
his jaw goes slack and weak.

Dark forms heave as she takes him,
he takes her, they take. Two days a week
I pass, imagine her perfumed, well-groomed,
knitwear with no trace of lint.

Her hair glints in the weak winter sun –
he tweaks at the mirror and he gives,
she gives,
they give. Each week.

It isn’t love she feels.
I can tell by the bridge of her back,
how her body arcs over the gearstick,
reaches those thighs where his hands lay flat.

For weeks, they’ve an air of wilful oblivion,
unaware of that spacious interior,
how visible their mundane lust how exposed

the tiny football scarf suckered to the window.

First Earlies

The first, still sun we’ve had for days
and we bathe in it, incredulous –
me with our babe in arms, he with our first in hand.
Dazed, we survey the storm-swept borders
scan the allotted land for harvest.

Potatoes! We fall on them, finger rake the moist warm loam
for tubers, swiping their luminous skins with our thumbs.
Our eldest gasps and utters streams of sound with infant joy.

We stop, we stand.

We breathe.

We smell the petrichor,
watch as she turns up spuds like her newest words:
a vegetable lexicon tumbling over the stones.

First Earlies was originally published by Yew Tree Press, 2019.

Clutch

for h.l.

in the nest of my fist, a fledgling
scooped up from the lane

her soft unfinished beak
her shining eye
a buoy ringing in the green cathedral of trees

a single yellow feather wisps across my knuckle
there is a twitch of elephant digits

and I think about keeping her

raising her as my own
feeding her worms

but I let her go

chirring for the ones I could not save.

Oil on Canvas

In the chiaroscuro of her eyes there are deserts and swamp forests,
escarpments, flats of salt and vistas beyond the folds of flesh
soldered shut by surgical birth, the liverish scars gone waxy white.
There are palimpsests of palms upon her palms – the weens, the work fucks,
the women who took her last yuan for tapestries and hair combs on the mountain.
Whirlpools are quarried to embers in the clotted scumbling of her gut –
her conduct rendered now with prudent strokes of fat over lean.
But the song inside her head is still stuck
on her alla prima approach to relationships I hate you
the rasping of a parent’s dying breath go well, I love you –
held on the impasto of her lips, the anatomy of her dancing feet.

Good Girl

Her climb was perpetual, summit after summit,
scrambling over fissile shale, porous as swaddling,
sick with altitude. The air thinned, cymbaling her chest
like a mechanical monkey – but she was gut-tugged
through parting cloud, a full blue line, taut and expectant.

At last, she found it on a mountain top, half-submerged
beneath a cairn of stones –stacked, matt, pale and sheen –
a liverish disc, gritty to touch. Meat-heavy. Such
tightly woven cotyledons of villi, veins and blood,
the deciduous matter of family lore.

She did not flinch when hefting this foundation stone
into the nave of her life. Did not see its feathers
at her neck, crushing her spine with the weight of itself
until her fingertips revealed the words carved in:
daughter, brother, uncle, a mother’s mother’s gift.

Kneeling at the shore she hacked the cord with granite
until her knuckles showed, unloading on the salt, swell, source.
.

JLM Morton lives in Gloucestershire, England, snatching as much time as she can to write between caring for a young family, renovating a house and staring up the barrel of a demanding day job. Her first set of poems was recently published by Yew Tree Press for the Stroud Poets Series and she is currently working on a collection.

Website: jlmmorton.com