Chris Murray

“Voices from Auschwitz” by Fiona Pitt-Kethley

July 14th, 2019

Voices from Auschwitz

I

Suitcases “Brown leather, nothing but the best,” he said,
his family lived well. This sturdy case
had been to Biarritz and back again.
Its partner travelled with his son and wife,
to Switzerland, stuffed full of jewels and clothes.
They made it, just. My master stayed too long.
That extra day of business was his last.
Leather is heavy. Porters carried me
on holidays, but on this final trip
my master staggered to his journey’s end.
His soft hands blistered with the weight of me.
You get no service on the road to Hell.

Another case, a dark grey cardboard one,
with worn old shirts and yellowing underwear.
His overcoat was pawned. I held the rest.
The men who carried us, Heinrich and Ernst,
who never would have mixed in outside life,
struck up a friendship in their final days,
picked lice together by the barbed wire fence.
Death’s a great leveller that knows no class.
A few weeks “Arbeit” frees a man from wealth.
The millionaire and tramp both look alike
when spat upon and herded to their graves.

II

Song of the Shoes

My shoes were kid, the finest from the shop.
My father made them for me with his love.
“Liebchen!” he called me as he put them on.
I was too young to button them myself.
I ran to him in them. My staggering steps
left little wear upon the leather soles.
I felt the world beneath my feet at last.
I ran a little, then he picked me up.
I never really learnt to walk alone,
my mother’s, father’s, then, the soldiers’ arms
carried me onward, bore me to my end.

They took my shoes. I dreamt of other ones.
My father had been saving coloured scraps,
bright, sizzling red to case my tiny feet
and match the roses on my mother’s dress.

The ones I left were white, my first and last,
made from the kid he used for wedding shoes.
They lie promiscuously in the heap
with tough brown boots once worn by laughing boys.
A million visitors walk by them now.

III

Two Tons of Hair

Yes, every age is represented here:
soft silky children’s hair, like thistledown,
a matron’s plait as heavy as her hips,
grey locks, at least old Eva had some time
to live, to love, to make her own mistakes.
She even had begun to look ahead,
enjoyed the thought of finding peace in death,
but not this sort, one that was dignified,
a gentle sleep, reposing in her bed,
from which she’d wake no more, she’d dreamed of that.
Her children round to say their last goodbyes.
Her daughter to inherit her fox fur,
her rings, the locket and the photographs.
Her son, just married, would need furniture.
the bed and sideboard, dining table, chairs…
The choice was taken from her with her clothes.
Nothing to hold and nothing to bequeath.
What dignity was left? In her last weeks
she faded to a dried-out Dürer witch,
with flapping dugs, where once she’d suckled babes.

I grew on Anna’s head. Dark shiny coils,
rolled tightly back and pinned beneath her hat.
I was her pride and joy. She ceased to hope
the day they hacked me off. “It will grow back!”
poor dying Eva said. But she was wrong
Time had run out as well for her and me.
The hair that lies here never had a chance
to grow and flourish on a dead girl’s skull.
Anna is ash, her friends, buried or burned.

Next to me lies another woman’s hair,
A horsetail hank. Her coarse peroxide blonde
did not deceive the officers who searched.
A hasty dyeing led to hasty death.

IV

I Can See Clearly Now
(Or Through a Glass Darkly)

Hopelessly tangled in the heap of frames
these cheap wire spectacles belonged to Hans.
There’ll be no four-eyes jokes where he’s gone now.
No cruel boys to break the glass in them.
His shop is closed, the window panes were smashed.
The stock was looted by the self-same boys,
the clever automata that he made,
a trapeze artist turning on a swing,
a bear with cymbals and a skating girl.
Yes, all his “children” in the cold outside.
The wooden drummer still performs a roll
as he is carried out. A dancing mouse
dies in the gutter with a clockwork whirr.
Yes, much of it is crushed in the boys’ haste.

Some toys are kept and later they are sold.
They pass through several hands. The price goes up.
The stamped initial H becomes a mark
That dealers treat with something like respect,
although the real provenance is lost.
Collectors snap them up. They’re far too good
to find their way, these days, into kids’ hands.
Several Museums of Childhood bid for them.
Their wood and tin outlive the human span.

Poor Hans, sometimes it pays not to see much.
The fields of mud, the fences of barbed wire,
the crematorium was just a blur.
Par-blindness spared him much that sighted men
would pay a little fortune not to see.
Myopic Hans goes stumbling to the light.
Anna who turned him down is with him now.
Beauty and ugliness met the same end.

V

Last rites

Survival is the only game at last.
While still alive, these living skeletons
must struggle to keep down their scraps of food,
retain the spark of life. Hold their last warmth
embracing strangers is their only hope
as icy winds track through the long hut walls.
Survive to tell the world. Hold on somehow.
Plan for some future life and not give up,
Hold to the shreds of what had meant so much.
“Curse God and die!” Job’s wife once said to him.
Curse God and live! Some of them took that path,
Defiant atheism worked for some.
“A kindly God would never let us die…”
While others clung to rituals they’d known,
circumcised babies with a shard of glass
or sang the Shabat songs in the latrines.
No wrongs, no rights, only survival counts.
The world must find these witnesses alive.
True history is made of memories.

Voices from Auschwitz is © Fiona Pitt-Kethley

Fiona Pitt-Kethley has been living in Spain since 2002 with her husband, chess grandmaster and former British Champion, James Plaskett and their son, Alexander. She is the author of more than 20 books of prose or poetry published by Chatto and WIndus, Abacus, Peter Owen, Sinclair-Stevenson, Arcadia Books, Salt and smaller presses. She has published many articles in the Independent, the Guardian, the Times, the Telegraph, London Review of Books and other magazines and newspapers.

Fiona Pitt-Kethley links

http://www.fionapitt-kethley.com
http://www.amazon.com/Fiona-Pitt-Kethley/e/B001K7VT4S

“Villanelle to Cold Psalms” and other poems by Jane Burn

July 7th, 2019

Villanelle to Cold Psalms

Here among the gloam owls, their cry of cold psalms
I am treetops, bearing a crown of night. The dark is born.
I imagine the death I would make in the strange of your arms,

shiver beneath the void of stars, sing the charm
of moths. Wish them against my neck. My skin mourns,
here among the gloam owls, their cry of cold psalms.

Dusk is a lie. This is crushed light, visions of curious calm.
I am prey, twitching in uneasy sleep, a distant spire’s thorn.
I imagine the death I would make in the strange of your arms.

Here are the tendons of my neck. Here is the throb of harm.
I am lost as one drop of rain is lost to a storm,
here among the gloam owls, their cry of cold psalms.

I bear a ghost of gloom in the curl of my palm.
I am the moonlight’s gash where the sky is torn.
I imagine the death I would make in the strange of your arms,

shiver of mist upon my mouth. I drink its balm,
damp upon the tip of thirst. Leave me to mourn,
here among the gloam owls, their cry of cold psalms.
I imagine the death I would make in the strange of your arms.

Are Vaginas a Deal-Breaker Thing?

Let’s face it. I
are discomfited by my own, unsure
of the marsh,
unsettled by its sodden pocket.
Use a mirror and get to know yourself, I once read and I never
got round to doing that.

I can imagine a world of moulded dolls, imagine
the simple acts like
brushing each other’s hair,
shopping for mushrooms,
reading a column out loud,
swinging bags and holding hands.

We could build our chaste cairns upon the grass –
I’ll tell you that your laugh is like a castle’s wall
and you might say, today is all about discovering.
Might knock upon the bathroom door,
wince at my archipelago. See how I am the Orkneys,
how my tits are Egilsay and Wyre, how my belly is Eynhallow –

its stilling womb,
its natural abandon,
its offer to birds.
Or you might say scooch, so we can spire
at opposite ends of the bath and I would use
my best Joyce Grenfell voice to tell you, straight-faced

that there really is a place there called Twatt.
I can think about lips,
wrists, arms, eyes. Here is an offer of terrified flesh.
I will be undelivered.
I could have put a bow on a broken soul.
Gifted the screams I swallowed and kept.

I gave/my shame/to water/it told me/nothing about/myself

a kill of un-done bones/heron’s moveless stain/quiet worlds of moss/tilt
of riverbank/kingdom of frogs/vein of silverfish/weak baste of sun’s eye/
remember the/language of my mother’s hands/feral squat to piss on roots/
oh I wanted/thin rake of dusk/I saw a woman/wear a crown of dull sky/
here is a gift of throats/the water wears a skin of ghosts/you will not/
meet/the craving of cold palms/oh I saw a woman/reflections of trees/
are a desire of knives/fecund splay of spawn/wound of coming night/
I hear/your breath/your heart/a claim of fallen moons/a trick of wet

The Un-Flight of Porcelain Birds

My pretty flock, my throng of bisque,
brittle murmuration, flinty perched.
Silent wards of song, dawn finds you unyielding –
no rising in your tinted eyes.
If you drop, you fail to fly.
Your breasts crack. Your little heads shatter,
make the floor a nest of spelks,
a splint of muted beaks.
Spillikins of feather,
your wings are kept by clay.
Roost in my palm, echo of wild things.
You have never trembled evening from your throat.
You have never known
the blue sail of sky.

November’s Spoil of Rain and Plague

I am the daughter of stopped clocks – a plastic moon
where moments have stuck. Too late for elevenses,
much too soon for lunch. I am the passage of time,
its meaningless tether of hands.
I am the slicing of dials, have guessed at the hour
of my birth. I am Sunday’s child though I am not
blithe, or bonny. Wise nor good. My stars
are not aligned, I am not cusped. I am a mother’s
failed prediction. How massive my love can be, how
my tongue lolls like a dog, how I wear my heart
like a pelt of brindle screams! Come to the crush
of my great arms – I am Kraken, the page
you wrote in the Burn Book. I am Edward’s fingered knives.
I am cupboards on uncertain afternoons,
their content of chipped cups.
Allow me to offer my stains. I have held you in my brain
and failed to shift your face.
Fur and carcass – something ate the heart of me
and wasted the rest. There must have been a tunnel
and I slithered from it, wet and blind. I came
from a length of ferrous wire between us,
belly to blood. It fed me on ash and blades,
on something I can still taste.

Things Today To Do

Fumble on an octopus of keys
Wind the time from a crypt of dead wheels
Slam a drawer upon a bud of spoons

Sing into a citadel of tea
Cross your heart against a hex of bread
Mop the crackled tale of willow plates

Search the skim of glass for hints of rain
Find the altered ripples of a man
Ask the square of window for your face

Jane Burn’s poems have appeared in many magazines, such as Butcher’s Dog, The Interpreter’s House, Obsessed With Pipework, The Curlew, The Fenland Reed, Strix, Under the Radar, Bare Fiction, The Rialto, Prole, Long Poem Magazine, Elsewhere, Crannog, Domestic Cherry, Iota Poetry, The Poet’s Republic, Eye Flash Poetry, Finished Creatures and the Oxford English Journal. Her poems have also been published in anthologies from The Emma Press and Seren. Her poems are regularly placed in competitions and she has been nominated for both The Pushcart and Forward Prize.

“Swimming” and other poems by Eimear Bourke

June 30th, 2019

Cerebral Sorbet

I’d like to take my brain out

Just for a day.
And put it on ice
Cerebral sorbet

A chance to cool down and let these thoughts melt away

A hollow cranium could be lots of fun
My skull drying out while I play in the sun

I’d go to the beach and get salt on my skin
Under the waves,
With the fishes I’d swim

Deeper and deeper
To dark blue I would dive
Where ringing in my ears would signal
I’m alive

I’ll come back of course.
There’s no other way

A brainless lawyer in the sea cannot stay.

Sand ‘tween my toes, I’d walk to the shore
Encephalon recharged
Bad thoughts no more

Attempts to summarize nine years in a page

First, there were bubble-gum candy shoes and a low-slung ponytail
You. Standing in the hallway of a dorm filled with 2011 college girl energy.
Which you were lacking.
Half nervous. Half apathetic.

I had my own reasons for coming out to say hi.
In bed with a beautiful boy. But wanting any excuse to get away.

Unhurriedly yet firmly a friendship formed.
Small gestures like doing one another’s dishes. Chatting over popcorn and MTV.
Invariably leading to hangovers, and four friends in a single-bed.

Time trundles on.
Priorities and personalities change.
New sexualities and new focuses are found.
There are drugs, lights and endless amounts of paperwork and studying.

Sometime mid-2013 (I think); we come together on a peeling couch
In a friend’s apartment on Cork Street
And after that nothing is quite the same.
Not wanting the sex. Not wanting you.
Wanting to hurt another person. In a far off place.

But alea iacta est
The death knell of one form of friendship
And the beginning of a new era.
The “Complicated, What’s Going on Years?”
I wouldn’t take them back.

Like a drawstring purse. I hold them close to my person.
Even still.

Memories of phone calls that lasted ‘til the early hours of the morning.
I’m a lawyer now. And you’re in pilot school in Spain.
It’s 2016 but we’re watching a 2003 Louis Theroux documentary over Skype.
In the laptop screen glow and the breath in my earphones, I could tell you anything.
But I can’t. There is so much not said.
But only sometimes.
Other times there is nothing there. We’re just watching neo-Nazi children play guitars at 4am.

Every time you’re home we’re holding hands beneath bedsheets.
Is this normal?
I feel like I’m losing my mind. And losing all sense of what our friendship once was.
And talking to you is like talking to a wall.
So in 2017 I pick freedom. After that, I don’t talk to you at all.

Until 2019. When things aren’t quite so raw.
When we meet for a formal coffee I can still see that nervous teenager in your eyes
What do you see when you see me?

Cycling to Howth in Autumn

Spokes spinning
faster than our lazy legs are pedal
pressing

Out of time

Adults on bikes
Cycling to the past

The sun’s reflecting off your backlight
I’d follow you anywhere
Not just to the beach

An Explanation

You’d imagine there’d have been a broken plate,
—I’m wracking my mind—
But in the rubble of six years, there’s not one household item.

I can think of whispered furies,
On cobblestoned streets in Temple Bar.
Or even drunken outbursts,
And shrieks —like wounded kittens screaming—
For everyone to hear.

But like there’s no home,
There’s no friend to turn to.
There’s no advice you can ask for,
Not when you love in a box.
(You can scream but no one can hear it)

II.

I used to dream –and fearfully I’ll add
–Why not be honest?
That one day it would be real.
I don’t know how it would have happened.
Or what you would have done.
It probably wouldn’t have been like in the movies,
Where you’d grab my hand and say she’s the one.

A quieter victory I guess.
An L’Oreal moment.
Where you’d turn and say she’s worth it.
If even just to me at first.

III.

What happens when there’s nothing left?
I’ve always watched the waves flee to sea.
As a young girl, I didn’t believe in reconciliation or salvaging.
But the waves that go come back.
Still —they don’t break the same.

Swimming

And so from the heights of a top bunk
We plunged
Into the wet depths of a deep blue sea

As children, we couldn’t have understood that no lifeboats would come
That one would swim ashore, while the other treaded water endlessly
Incapable of forgetting the coloured fish and dizzying euphoric rush of salt on wet skin

Mermaids they were
Half-legged and half other that no one else could understand

Yet you walked ashore and resigned me to a life as a whale

Coming back on occasional twilight eves
To swim with me in the moonlight
To dance under the waves

Water pounding against our eardrums
Eyes flooding with burning confusion
And yet it’s calm

DRUM DRUM DRUM
and what is that whoosh and crash
The rushing promise of you coming home —

It’s gone forever.

You crash upon that shore
Green blue turns to white
And I sing this lonely whale song

Having become a woman you can’t possibly understand.

So I wait.

To be harpooned,
Or to drown, to die.

Swimming and other poems are © Eimear Bourke

Eimear Bourke is a 27-year-old Irish lawyer who has always been interested in poetry and writing. Born in Dublin and raised in Navan, Co. Meath, she graduated from Maynooth University in 2013 with a degree in Law and English. Her writing focuses on interpersonal relationships and Irish seascapes. She is inspired by Yrsa Daley-Ward and Rita Ann Higgins.

“Queen Medb Speaks to the Shy Poet” and other poems by Trish Bennett

June 23rd, 2019

Connemara Rocks

You held me with champagne
in a Galway crystal glass.
The light fizzed through its facets,
and danced a sparkling ring.
‘No dawter of mine’ll be on time,
make him wait’ you said.
Your brother; our driver,
obeyed.

We parked at the church,
set into the mouth of a bad turn.
The blessed virgin — mounted on granite,
stood guard outside.
Celtic crosses scattered
on the grave hill behind.
To the side, a stream flowed
under the stone-bridged road,

feeding the lake in front,
from where two swans watched
you open the door,
and hold my hand
to support my high,
heeled step.
You carried the weight of my frock,
the countryman’s Gok Wan.

I held tight to my autumn bouquet
as we strolled into that place,
built on unyielding rock
—a slope to its aisle.
‘The Coolin’ began.
My Bridesmaid led the march,
you slipped your arm in mine,
laughed, as you led me on.

Flower girls ran in a fizz to grab hold,
and tow us up that hill,
to the green marbled altar.
You smiled,
as you sacrificed me there,
to face the music
— half-cut.

Publication Credits
An earlier version, entitled Galway Crystal, Shortlisted, North West Words / Donegal Creameries Poetry Award 2017. Published in North West Words Magazine, 2018. Editors, Nick Griffiths, Deirdre Hines and Deirdre McClay.

Slices

You caught me today, at the turn
of that tight hill, before home.

When the sun dissected the trees,
a slice of the past shone;

that summer’s day
in our shop,

your suet-softened hands
held the knife,

as you dissected a liver
to show me fluke

‘Keep a tight grip‘, you said,
so it won’t slip as you slice.

You carved the disease out,
diced the rest for cats.

‘I could be a surgeon in another life’, you remarked
and we laughed,

before the memory fades,
replaced by the last sigh from your lungs,

as the grip tightens
around my heart.

Publication Credits
Published, Issue 1, Smithereens 2018 Editor Kenneth Keating.

Wisps

In the half light
betwixt day and night,
A glimmer whispers
by the edge of my eye.
Tendrils of a moment,
caught
between the suns last rays,
and the moonlit sky.

In the half light,
they appear.
Goosebumps salute the past.
Tense.
Yet, no deceit lies
in those prickly scents,
mellow roses,
wisps from a long-dead pipe,
envelop the heir,
to their circle of life.

Publication Credits
This poem was previously published in A New Ulster: The Hidden and Divine, Female Voices in Ireland, October 2017, Editor Amos Greig.

Rituals

I stand in the corridor of power
and face the congregation.

The sun
illuminates the island altar.

Solid walls echo the sizzle of pans,
steaming hymns.

Often, my chant — not quite Gregorian,
catching the custard on the cusp of a curdle.

We’ll leave soon.
I will miss this chapel of a kitchen,

the soul of a borrowed place,
we never called ‘home’.

Our brown boxes,
taped to escape,

surround the naked dresser
in scribbled rows.

I plant my feet firmly,
whisk in hand,

seize a tight grip on the bowl.
The final liturgy begins.

Publication Credits
This poem was previously published in A New Ulster: The Hidden and Divine Female Voices in Ireland, October 2017, Editor Amos Greig.

The Day I Became a Royalist

The memory of that day’s still sweet,
the way the sun filtered through hedges
beginning to explode
with blooms of hawthorn and chestnut;
the coconut trace that floated up
from yellow bubbled whin;
the excited buzz from her fans,
humming as I set to work.

Deaf as beetles they were,
yet they danced their tales,
while their friends watched
and felt the vibrations.
I longed to dance too,
but my rebel feet refused.

I looked the part.
In fact, I was smoking,
with all the right gear to meet a Queen.
No high fashion, fascinators, stilettos or frocks,
demure — in loose white,
a veil over my face,
and gloves.

The roar arose from the crowd.
Herself was close.
Royal guards drew lances,
made charges as if to say,
‘Your kind’s not welcome here’.
I worked on — ignored the line,
like my Father before,
when I was a child.

When her Highness appeared in my frame of view,
maybe it was the alien look of her dress,
poured out in layers like dark chocolate,
or maybe it was her long legs,
that could do with a rub of the razor,
that made her look huge.
She walked that confident walk of a girl at the top.
Her retinue fussed, had respect.
While her signature scent was strong,
they remained happy, loyal
content.

My senses captured it all
in a way no camera could;
that joy as I watched them dance and hum,
the chinook noise from drones,
the scent of our land collected, condensed,
mind-stamped into my memory cells,
that brought me home to childhood days
when my brother and I dug sections of gold
on our Fathers return.

The memory’s still sweet of that day
when I turned,
on meeting the Queen
of Apis Mellifera Mellifera,
my black honey bees.

Publication Credits
BBC Radio Ulster Time of Our Lives, Jan 2019.
The Leitrim Guardian 2019, Nov 2018, Editor Bláithín Gallagher.
Highly Commended, Bailieborough Poetry Prize, 2018.

Queen Medb Speaks to the Shy Poet.

In my time,
the bardic kind commanded the rath of royalty.
For fear of their sting,
we gave them everything.
They ‘liked’ me,
shared my scéal*,
I was Eireann’s Kardashian Medb.

The monks’ day dawned
and Kings were drawn to the power of the quill.
The page had turned.
The Bardic way faded like old ink.

Clerics came,
they scripted my tale in “post truth”.
Two thousand years have passed,
yet pilgrims still climb Knocknarea with a stone for my cairn
wondering whether I lie there, or at Rathcroughan, my home.

II.

Twenty first century banfhile**,
cooking, cleaning, rearing young.
You hold back your words for fear of their power,
twitter as you peer into your faceless world.

Grasp the quill in your hand banfhile**
but feel that bard in your blood,
share your words aloud.
Let the tale prevail,
yet script your celtic truth,
or sit there doing nothing,
and become a relic too.
.

*Scéal = story.
**Banfhile = poetess.

Publication Credits
An earlier version of this poem was previously published in ‘A New Ulster: The Hidden and Divine, Female Voices in Ireland’, October 2017, Editor Amos Greig.

Trish Bennett hails from County Leitrim. She’s got the breeze of Thur (the mountain, not the God) in her blood. She crossed the border to study over twenty years ago and was charmed into staying by a Belfast biker. They have settled themselves into a small cabin near the lakeshore in Fermanagh, and try to keep the noise down in their bee-loud glade. Bennett writes about the shenanigans of her family and other creatures. Sometimes she rants. She was a finalist in seven poetry competitions in the past two years, including North West Words, The Percy French, Bailieborough, and The Bangor Literary Journal, and has won The Leitrim Guardian Literary Award for poetry twice. Bennett is a Professional Member of the Irish Writers Centre.

Twitter: @baabennett Facebook: trishbennettwriter Blog: Bennett’s Babblings

“The Other Side of Things” and other poems by Robyn Rowland

June 22nd, 2019

I. The Other Side of Things.

from the sequence Sky Gladiatorials

Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown made the first non-stop aerial crossing of the Atlantic, Newfoundland to Ireland, 1919.Previous to that, they both flew for Britain in World War I. Alcock ‘was the first man to bomb Istanbul’; then, with plane trouble, crashed-landed near Suvla, 1917. He was imprisoned in Kedos, Turkey.

Air is crisp in the cockpit and seeded with summer
when he flies toward that once powerful city.
Constantinople, desired, mysterious, Mimar Sinan’s
mosques of exquisite geometry defining its shape.
Libraries bulge with rare illuminated books.
A city lovely in both poetry and Churchill’s dreams
sits unaware of the bombs Alcock clutches under his plane

The boy Irfan Orga is nine, father taken to the war,
never to return, his small brother ill from hunger,
grandmother sharing their two rooms, hampered by
new poverty, their home burned out by fire,
everything of beauty gone. In Mahmut Paşa Street,
his mother struggles through the crowded market to forage,
unused to being in public, to being touched like that.

She barters her family wedding gifts and silk-woven rugs
for any food possible. She sells them slowly, daily.
That day Irfan is carrying haricot beans and dried peas,
when just behind the station on the cobbled street,
across the Golden Horn three planes appear.
He never saw such a thing, wings and whirring. He wishes
he could fly. His mother is rooted into the stone street.

Deranged by fear, she grabs him to cower under a tattered
shop-awning she believes will hide them from the eyes
of pilots, field mice under a hawk’s gaze.
A roar, a shattering explosion, shaken earth and dust pall,
the mutilation, cartloads of lolling heads, limbs akimbo,
disconnected flailing stumps and the surprised wounded,
the de-limbed, faceless, the horses speared with their own carts.

This was the first bomb. They meant to hit the war office
but the bombs went wide, a man said. No-one believed him.

On the Beach

Bozcaada Island, Turkey

There is a bride in glorious white froth, laughing,
her black Turkish hair a net of breeze,
new husband stumbling on the rocks grinning, because
after the photographer leaves, she holds a selfie-stick.

There are two women friends, Meral and İlknur,
ambling, chatting, looking for deep-sea fossils set in stone
to embellish İlknur and Şefik’s home he builds nearby,
its stone and tiled beauty emerging from his dream.

I trail behind, head down for the small shells,
Trivia levantina found only here on Bozcaada,
exquisite false cowries, tiny ridges ringing them,
their tail canals rose-pink or purple.

There is a giant ship beached, Egyptian, looming
into a white sun streaking the sky pink with ebru clouds
trawling across the tankers far out and strobing towards us.
The ship’s name is Mercy God, a kind of hopeful prayer.

Shipwrecked last winter, fierce winds drove it sideways
ashore onto this beach, a grimace of cold sand.
Its cargo of onions was rotting for months,
a stench to banish all but the desperate.

Such strong women, we joke as I film my two slight
friends leaning on the ship like tiny ants pretending
to push it out, its hulk now home to crabs, birds
Up near its prow you can just make out Arabic for Allah.

Tiny shoots are rising like small green wings
out of the golden dunes nearby. Watermelon, Meral tells me,
someone’s been having a picnic and yes, they will grow
and the fruit will come for summer. You will be here.

On the way back past the darkening hull there lies a faded lifeboat.
Seal-grey with orange fluoro trim, it is half-buried now.
I had almost missed it, so much sand on its torn belly.
I quiz my friends – From the ship, I imagine?

No. Syrians, Meral instructs me, suddenly grim, and the way
she accents it – Surians – takes me a minute to absorb the facts,
sea now swallowing a sun burning orange with its last breath.
They tried the sea. They did not make it to Lesvos.

I am told like a child barely able to grasp meaning.
Beside the wreckage sits just one shoe, a man’s walking shoe,
faded brown suede, its many laces salt-stiff. My eyes are
pegged to it, cannot leave it. I am glad there is nothing else.

Across the narrow Mytilini Strait on Lesvos, women
are beachcombing too. They collect children’s clothing washed up.
They itemise, they clean it for those who might still come,
who survive crossing the sea of death that gulps them by the boatload.

Included in debris from three thousand dead in the Mediterranean –
a tiny pink long-sleeved shirt with boat neck, for a girl, size three months;
small black stretch pants with nylon sequined bows, size two years;
a pair of sky-blue heavy fleece pants, for a boy, aged five.

I. Family Catalogue August 1880

from the sequence Touchstones

for Annie Harding Lambert and Joseph Lambert, married in Kilmallock in 1861,
cursed with scarlet fever 1880

That year the Observatory in Armagh for the first time recorded
bright sunshine data using a Campbell-Stokes sunshine recorder.
Loving Katharine O’Shea met married Charles Parnell. History changed.
Susan Kate Lambert was 14, fate a flush in her bright-cherry lips,
when August 22 she died of scarlatina. The windows were already boarded.

That year the Irish Land League refused to harvest potatoes for
Captain Boycott and England paid ten million pounds
to get the crop in. Maria Jane Lambert was 10, still snuggling up
when crimson fuchsia dropped its silent bells, August 11.
and ill, her strawberry tongue peeled. No boycott for this.

Rebel bushranger in Australia, Ned Kelly had been captured. Joseph Lambert
named for his father, died at 4, August 21, fever burning brighter than turf
in the grate. Irish Renaissance began its flowering, women entered
medical schools. The red mist snuffed out Charles Edward Lambert aged 1,
August 5. Ned was 25. Such is life, he said, before they hanged him.

Contagion slunk deep into the corners of the house. Feral, it scuttled
across beds, breathing down sleeping throats, to bloom scarlet from inside
and all the love that exhausted itself in holding and mopping, wasted
by the upturned sods in the graveyard. Famine was still lurking,
a bad year in the West. Joseph, heart failing, was pensioned out.

Her own namesake at 7 months had coughed her way out of life in ’75.
But four children dead in a month. Too many for headstones. Fear carved
into Annie’s face, whittled her youth. How to keep the last three alive –
8, 13, 16 – boys she needed to become men? Big windows, clean air. Yes.
Big fields to run. Not a damp turf-smoked room, sun scratching at the glass.

II. Annie Harding Lambert Limerick, 1880

Four children dead to scarlatina, August 1880

Razored my long hair.
Hung it in shreds
at the windows.
Started on my arms.
Want them slit,
splintered glass.
Rough, spiky shards
that pierce right in.
Violent madness.
Strong.
Maybe I can terrify him too.
Frighten him off
with my banshee pain,
mighty howling grief.
Hold him back
in my sharpened arms,
all spikes.
Bleed him.
Old Red Breath.
Old greedy bastard.
I think – Red is it?
I can give you Red!
I tore myself, tore myself
till Joe stopped me.
Bound my talons back
with his tears.

Moon Dreaming

Bone white, the full moon
threads itself round curtain cracks,
through the lace cloth of my heart,
the same moon that lays itself
on your sheet of water
harboured below your window,
far away in space, in time,
both of us on islands, decades apart.
You placed a shell ring on my finger.
The sea gave it to you for me.
Solid twist knotted where a gem might be,
its interior is softly polished, the inside
of an oyster, from which the pearl fell.

that together, we went

(also published in Poetry Ireland)

that we went out, the neighbours,
one deaf since birth, alive to music and words,
chock-full of imagination,
the other intelligent and curious.

that we went out, friends,
along the Connemara shoreline with its jagged hurt,
its timeless stories of lost roofs off houses,
stone-walled gables standing alone now.

that we went out
to the local hotel, new and about to struggle
that held its opening, and we went,
past the ragged houses and the early evening.

that coming home, together with a glass too many,
road along the shoreline bending and swaying
like old Dylan songs they had played,
and against the still-high sun at late evening

one cow stock-still on the ridge of hill near home
a glaze of tangerine sky on its rump
and behind all blue, like that’s what heaven is.
and knowing that this is the feeling that’s best,

fluid old-fashioned thanks, almost in tears
for the friendship and the slow ways home
and the twilight, dripping orange and blue
under a three-quarter moon before summer.

All poems are published in Mosaics from the Map (Doire, 2018).

Robyn Rowland is an Irish-Australian citizen living in both countries. She regularly works in Turkey. She has written 13 books, 10 of poetry. Her latest books are Mosaics from the Map (Doire, 2018) and her bi-lingual This Intimate War Gallipoli/Çanakkale 1915 – İçli Dışlı Bir Savaş: Gelibolu/Çanakkale 1915 (Five Islands, 2015; repub. Spinifex Press, Australia, 2018), Turkish translations, Mehmet Ali Çelikel. Robyn’s poetry appears in national and international journals and in over 40 anthologies, including 8 editions of Best Australian Poems. She has read and taught in Ireland for 35 years and has been invited to read in India, Portugal, Ireland, the UK, the USA, Greece, Austria, Bosnia, Serbia, Turkey and Italy, where, along with Canada, Spain and Japan, she has also been published, sometimes in translation. An extended interview with her appeared in Agenda Poetry, UK, December 2018. She has two CDs of poetry, Off the Tongue and Silver Leaving – Poems & Harp with Lynn Saoirse.

She has been filmed reading for the National Irish Poetry Reading Archive, James Joyce Library, University College Dublin.

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.

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

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.

“Ecliptic” and other poems by Karen O’Connor

June 8th, 2019

Red

He said my chi was unbalanced
Suggested I wear a red linen shawl
Around my waist – to keep my liver warm

Yoda of the herb world
Laughed at my expression
Admitted it sounded odd

But red always means heat, he explained
So I wore it, next to my kidneys
Like the scarlet woman

Wrapped in reminders of lust
I wore it for my gall bladder
For all hope of redemption

Then he heated me with Bamboo & Hoelen
Spiced me with Cinnamon
Peppered me with Peony

Seasoned so, he grilled me lightly
For three years, turning every quarter
Until my mouth grew apples

My skin sprouted olives
Peppers hung where my breasts had been.
Then he wrapped me in vine leaves

And buried me on the shore.
Warmed by the earth I waited – centuries
Until I was born from my sand womb

Wriggling out in a gush of warm sea water
Naked but for the birthmark
A ring of red around my middle

God Child – Still Birth

for Louie Joseph Collins

I am your Godmother
And yet when you were born
I didn’t want to hold you, or touch you
I couldn’t see past those plastic flowers
They’d wrapped your tiny peeling fingers round
Or the image of you being transported
From the labour ward in the blanket covered Moses basket
Or the room with the holy pictures and the low-watt lamp
Where you waited for our introduction

I was blinded by your frowning forehead
Your skin dark from waiting to be born
Hold him, hold him, pick him up and hold him
I took pictures, closed my eyes through the lens
Looked at the small table lamp, the crochet blanket, the floor

I watched your Nana though, my sister
Take away the plastic flowers; scoop you gently into her arms
And talk to you, talk to you
My darling little boy
I’m your Nana and I’ve waited a long time to meet you
It’s okay my darling, you’re safe now, nothing can harm you

And without warning you were there, in my arms
Surprised by the weight of you, the feel of you
I held you to my breast and closed my eyes
And I met you I met you
No words can explain that meeting
But I met you I met you

Now, when I am quiet, alone, painting
You pull the kitchen chair to the table
Kneel up to get a better view
Your curls wiry and unruly
Bounce with your rhythm
As your small fingertips – dip in the paint
Often leaving their mark at the edge of my canvas

Thaw

After three days
Of living in one another’s ear
I want to take my clothes off
Climb naked into the fridge
Curl into a foetal pose
Close the door
A hushed click
Marked by the trays and shelves
Piled with decaying cheese
Curdled milk, last nights Chinese
Or was it last weeks?
You’ll find me
A light dusting of frost
Like baby powder
My knees drawn to my breast
My fingers locked
Crisp, fresh, rejuvenated
In explanation, a short note
Pinned to the drinks dispenser
LEAVE TO DEFROST OVERNIGHT

Being your mother

I eat the things you spit out
I bend to your will
at night when I hold you
my shoulders breaking
from the strain
of your two-year
two-stone body
like my ribs will crack
and turn to dust
deep inside a place
I never knew existed
I sing, my breath catching
in my throat
your fingers instinctively
milking mine
settling into sleep
and still I hold you
pull you close
my muscles burn
the night ploughs on
but you and I are still suspended
in my mother’s arms
her fingers curling in my hair
her breath, like mine
breathing in with yours
so close, I often think
it’s you are holding both of us.

Ecliptic

Our daughter draws crop circles
on the hotel stationery
reminding me that we were married
on December twenty-first
the day the sun stood still
the warmest day
stunning after weeks of rain.
Your father, regal in his
soft cap and matching scarf,
your mother, my maid of honour
a role she had never fulfilled
and you and I after twenty years
saying ‘I do’ as though
we were new and shiny
looking into each other’s eyes
knowing nothing would ever
be the same again.
Afterwards in the hospice
his red rose buttonhole
pinned to his paisley pyjamas
your father told us to go,
waving his handkerchief as though
we were embarking on a voyage,
he sang a verse of
Limerick You’re a Lady
his voice unnaturally low
but clear and crisp
like those expanding circles
growing outwards, touching
space beyond the page.

Karen O’Connor is a winner of Listowel Writers’ Week Single Poem Prize, The Allingham Poetry Award, The Jonathan Swift Creative Writing Award for Poetry and the Nora Fahy Literary Awards for Short Story. She is a poet and short story writer and her work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies. Karen’s first poetry collection, FINGERPRINTS (On Canvas) was published by Doghouse Books in 2005. Her second collection, Between The Lines, also from Doghouse Books (2011), was featured on RTE Radio 1 Arts Programme, Arena.

Website: https://www.karenoconnor.co.uk/

“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

“The Many Splintered Night” and other poems by Aishling Alana Heffernan

May 26th, 2019

The Many Splintered Night

The trembling of my fingers as I hit the keypad,
wakens the dire horror of an unfocussed brain that seeps too much into the mire
of focussed restraint.
To dance under the moonlight in the eyes of the lights that pound into my head,
with the horror of a dancers aching bloodied feet,
the ache in a temple which builds, with quaking stranded legs,
It’s time to meet—
the one.

On the night watch stand, where the pendulum swings
into the land where the kings head swings, my destined king,
down, down into the bloodied dancers path in the mud strewn grass,
his head spins into the shining glass cut meadow
King
King
KING — without a head, but still
crammed into his crown.
—a sane mind is a very over-estimated thing.

When thought splinters into the cosmos,
minds shatter like a thousand splintered feelings captured in the grip of an opium haze
in the laze-y summer night
of a thousand splintered nights–
thought splinters into the cosmos of minds buzzing like hive-bees outside of the hive
-mind

The trembling of my fingers as I hit the keypad
wakens the dire horror of unfocussed brain that seeps too much into the mire of unfocussed
restraint
restraint, restrain it—the feathered spectrum of desire that seeps into the many splintered night.

How I loved the headless king,
How he sent me into the many splintered night.

Morning’s Good Morning

I open tender, dust encrusted eyes,
to morning’s good morning,
—fresh sunrise,
turn feverish cheek into
soft, soft cotton dreams,
even as they run far far from me.

Dream-child, dream-child,
What will you be?
When the morning sun rises,
from the freshwater sea?
Dream-child, dream-child,
What will you be?
Now your dreams are setting you free?

Kaleidoscope

Inversion means from the inside in,
he felt like colour and dragged me in,
as he spun from the inside in.
Kaleidoscope—
settled in skin.

All I could think of was wanting him—
not what it meant or where we had been
I wanted to feel the colour inside him
unfurling from the inside in.
Inversion, a kaleidoscope settled in skin, that’s him.

He’ll wander my mind and settle in my skin,
my pores will open to let the colours in,
breathe him in.

I know what he wants—
I can’t give it to him.
But still this Kaleidoscope draws me in —

And I see forests, a darkness that breathes, swirling broken oaken leaves falling onto a ground
filled with violets, touched by the moon in this room as rain draws me back to Earth.

Was it that much of a sin?
To want to taste his skin, and let
the colours in?

Even as they dragged me to his world,
and I bent down to drink,
the colours stopped my will to think.

Inversion means from the inside in,
he felt like colour and dragged me in,
as he spun from the inside in.
Kaleidoscope—
Settled in skin.

All I could think of was wanting him,
Not what it meant or where we had been,
I wanted to feel the colour inside him,
Unfurling from the inside in.
Inversion, a kaleidoscope settled in skin, that’s him.

Rag Doll

The walls of your eyes are cold slates;
statues, paintings, shrines to the shrivelled soul inside.
Locked and cross-hatched, weaved and embroidered until the pattern of you is a pattern of
unhealed scars building and building upon the rocky and treacherous foundation of pain.
In and out the needle stitches you, Rag Doll.
And from your mouth words like drops of infected blood creep into my skin and etch from my
pores the sunlight so recently sucked in,
From me you leach the life you crossed over and hid behind the painted veil of a painted face of
a painted life in a painted world,
Until your lies spin lies and worlds of their own, and your words lose even the ring of truth of
the suffering that once bound you to an earthly sphere,
And there in the madness of the clouds above, in the realm of the small and dead Gods, is where
your eyes see me, Rag Doll.

The walls of your eyes are cold slates,
They pay homage to the world left behind by the world left behind and the words of dead priests
still shuddering in their graves from the sins that mark the ineffable continuity of the energy of us *-
there is no hate from me to you,
The hate you hold for yourself is the hate of a civil war, tragic and born not of want but of a rising
tidal wave of resentment and fear and a driving blind force.
I was born when your child was not. Me, the fatherless one, gained the love of your father.
From me words you banished spill, not like drops of infected blood, but like names. Names bring
power, I name you, scarred one, weaved one, embroidered one, Rag Doll who from the corners of
my nightmares rises in the depths of my mind and teaches me again and again the meaning of
fear and love that is not love but bound to the conditions of a loveless bleak world in which you
are the rag doll and the needle both. The creation of pain and the creator of pain and the weaver
of lies and scorn.
Weave me, spin me, crosshatch and dress me. Strip the sunlight from my veins and from my
breathing skin, infect me with words so often told to yourself and still I will fight.
In and out the needle stitches you rag doll, kept in the past of a past of a past we never forget.
We never forget.
Stare at me.

The walls of your eyes are cold slates;
statues, paintings, shrines to the shrivelled soul inside
locked and cross hatched, weaved and embroidered until the pattern of you is a pattern of
unhealed scars building and building upon the rocky and treacherous foundation of pain
In and out the needle stitches you, Rag Doll,
even as you pull the sunlight from my skin–
I stand and sing to the heavens you no longer see through the cold, walled slates of your eyes.

Skin Covered Moon

The time chilling horror of the steel bled keys,
forcing into unbending skin,
the desperation of their need to dominate,
and open-
Bleed, unbending skin, under the moonlit songs,
of long forgotten kin.

The sky is wakening,
it’s eyes open wide,
earth is dancing with its mother tide-
the songs we sing as the mortals underneath
(the steel bled unbending moon)
in our open wounded skin
fall notes of the orchestras
like stitches to a disease
they are the songs of a people
wandering the waste heat of the universe cold in crystalline beauty—
The heat of the blood pumping through our veins
As the clitoris touches the head of the universe of man
Key to Key
Forcing unbending skin—
Are we already forgotten?
Shall we etch pain and match scratches, scars to scars,
as the earth trembles and tears fall from the stars
up from Earth hollow are the cries
of the steel bled keys
The steel bled keys.

The time chilling horror of the steel bled keys
sing to the ones who’s bodies were never meant to bleed
and yet the songs of their people
mirror march to home
the songs of the forgotten
—the ones who felt alone
as they watch the moon
skin covered and open
through skin veiled eyes.

Aishling Alana likes to think of herself as the embodiment of organised chaos. In her short(ish) life, she has overcome progressive pain diseases, has met ex-prisoners of death row, interviewed Ted X speakers and gained a Masters in Philosophy of the Arts. She loves bouldering and the sea, and can often be found in the thinking ‘woman’ pose while learning how to code. Having been born in Ireland at the brink of an intense culture shift, her writing takes in fantastical elements of sexuality, religion and identity.

“Homage To Kinsale” and other poems by Linda Ibbotson

May 26th, 2019

In the Absence of Boundaries –

The Third Movement

A note from the other side of silence
hangs in mid-air blue.
Undefined, intangible, unchartered,
neither lengthening nor shortening
or pulled by gravity’s umbilical chord.
I wonder if the wind will carry it in her wings,
perhaps into another realm?
Is it transcending, tentatively balanced on the sacred,
votive, perhaps coiling around a prayer wheel
or roaming the streets of Manhattan
to dance with Ksenia in various shades of black and white?

It has no place for concealment, no obstacle to circumvent.
Is it an apparition on centre stage with no curator,
a muted tone on a Chagall,
lowering its pitch to a finely tuned line of cerulean blue
or does it linger in an atelier in Antibes
where, ascending from a counterpoint
it improvises with the light?
It does not hide in the mouth of frescoes
limed with cardinal red where it cannot speak of freedom
or in the narrow place where it cannot stretch
and where the light does not enter.

Sometimes, it weighs as heavy as a Caravaggio,
a magnum opus as dark as a requiem’s crown of thorns,
a dying cadence longing to flee from a penitentiary stave
to lightly play between the shadow and shadowless
in your visionary third eye, the eye between eyes
where those who listen, see,
and those who see, listen.

In the Absence of Boundaries—
The Third Movement

Was published in California Quarterly Volume 42 No. 3 September 2016 (Editor, Jeanne Wagner, President – John Forrest Harrell)
Levure littéraire. – Numéro 13 2017 Editor-in-Chief Rodica Draghincescu; founder and general director of Levure littéraire. Invited to submit by Editor Helene Cardona

The Paris Sketchbook –

Pastiche
Paris opened as a book under my skin.
‘A Moveable Feast’ Hemingway once said.
There is no war under my skin,
only art that sometimes speaks of war.
In Eglise Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre the first six notes
of Bach’s Marcello ‘Adagio’ chime with Notre Dame.
A note cannot play without the air
and the air was filled with hibiscus.
Paris is a panacea, my alter ego blossoming
as sweet as Spring on Sunday’s stroll
in Jardin du Luxembourg, with Antonia.
Along the Seine, unblemished bathers
in July’s La Plage, promenade next to drowsy
heat of the afternoon; right and left bank booksellers
and posters of Le Chat Noir.
Pont Neuf, a synapse, lay between.

I watched the way the light fell
and I fell into myself
and it felt good and it felt strong.
I watched sober shadows from second story windows
at La Palette etched into lithographs
at Musée d’Orsay, in the same room
as Madamoiselle Chanel’s nonchalant eyes,
half sleeping, half remembering
the protagonists at Rue de Seine
more than a generation ago.

I wandered into antiquity, a mileu of veined alleyways
leaning into the bow of Île Saint-Louis.
I searched for lost time; a la recherché du temps perdu,
with Proust and Jean-Paul Sartre,
unconscious Belle Époque minds unleashed
along with expressos and coq au vin at Café de Flore.

I turned away from the rifled gendarmes and unrest,
opened my book and began to sketch.

The Paris Sketchbook—
Pastiche
Published in Levure littéraire. – Numéro 13 2017 Editor-in-Chief Rodica Draghincescu; founder and general director of Levure littéraire, Invited by Editor Helene Cardona

The Paris Sketchbook—

The Art of Seeing

There is a place
I sit and sketch the still shade
before the light fades
in and out of restless dusk.

There is a place
where broken shadows rendezvous with La Boheme
and Chopin’s Étude in C minor.
Falling as arpeggios,
weightless snow weighed heavily on cold bones of Paris,
impermanence melted white on soundless white
audible only at the edge of silence.

At Place de la Concorde,
Cleopatra’s needle stitches clouds,
an easterly wind severs flesh and pleached limes,
paper thin leaves shudder into chaos,
to bind winter wounds the colour of blood.

I sketch in grey graphite, the colour of stone
feel the chill of a revolution in my bones.

At Notre-Dame,
knarled gargoyles gather rain and Gregorian chants,
understand and mis-understand
the things that were, things that are
and l’ave nir, things to come.

It is cold at Père Lachaise as I watch the city of light tremble
and I wonder, would we see more clearly in the dark?

The Paris Sketchbook—
The Art of Seeing
Published in Levure littéraire. – Numéro 13 2017 Editor-in-Chief Rodica Draghincescu; founder and general director of Levure littéraire. Invited by Editor Helene Cardona

A Celtic Legacy

Rising from Celtic mists,
calloused white boned fingers
on goatskin
unravel lyrical etchings
on ancient stone
that weeps beneath wounds
swathed in redolent moss
and pink veined thrift.

Stone that cleaves to breath
from Uilleann pipes
shaped to spear the horizon
of Atlantic blue,
carrageen and crab.
Flint and turf furrow
Skellig spines
that once housed the faithful
and guillemots.

Ribs of currachs
kneel before
Ulysees and crosses
scoured by silent storms as
ancestral skin stretched
to beckon retreating tides.

Anchored between the sacred
and calloused white boned fingers
the Book of Kells
lay bleeding.

A Celtic Legacy
Published in The Enchanting Verses Literary Review Issue XX 2014 Editor-in-Chief Sonnet Mondal and Guest Editor Helene Cardona
Eastern World – Editor-in-chief Asror Allayarov
‘A Celtic Legacy’ in addition was read on radio in France and Ireland, performed at Theatre des Marronniers, Lyon, the village of Saint Pierre de Chartreuse and 59 Rivoli, Paris by Irish actor and musician Davog Rynne

Beat of the Bodhran

I hear your hands.
A benediction of skin to skin,
a mantra of ancient bone
rising above celestial scars
and swan sons of Lir.

I hear your hands
beneath the solstice;
acoustics ascending
from wings of sorrow
as Tara’s breath exhales,
lifting her emerald veil,
meadowsweet and whitethorn
woven to crown the halos of pilgrims.

In the distance,
shadows awaken
and dance with eyes
that speak of legends.
Drifting,
in the half light of an eclipse
time falls like snow
on Sliabh Luachra,
cold flesh bound
in sacred stone
as Danu’s limbs
coil around the limbs
of the immortal.

I hear your hands
In the heartbeat of ravens,
echoing in the womb
of the Holy Well
and the gentle whispers
of the wind that
cradle a lament.

I imagine laughter,
binding the wounds of heroes
turning blood into
petals of scarlet flax
as if fragility
becomes fertile.
On the street of the stone ringfort
I see streams of colour
in a blind pipers eyes.
Through each scarred hue
a solitary reed softly sings.
Behind, a damselfly
opens its wings
to catch the colour
before it too
bows its head in prayer.

I hear your hands
as they slip between Atlantic blue,
each wave knowing its birth.
In time and out of time
the restless salt breeze
flies with wild geese.
Somewhere,
in the rhythm of soft rain,
each drop remembers.

I hear your hands
in the flute song of the egret.
as Erin kneels before the ephemeral,
the sanctuary
of the known and the unknown,
her mossy gown
unfolding half forgotten myths.

I hear your hands,
a heartbeat
on an incandescent moon of skin,
a rhythm
in the wintered hands of a scythe,
in the footfall of red deer,
and in the light of the eternal.

And as I watch Celtic mists rise
above ancient stone,
I feel both a longing
and a belonging
to this land, this people, these words
that linger as a mantra,
in the warmth of solace
beneath the silent boundary
of my skin.

Beat of the Bodhran
Published in Asian Signature 30/01/2016

Homage to Kinsale

As nights obsidian curtain lifted,
the skylark heralds the dawn chorus
in my demesne of duck egg blue.
From my balcony,
a mirage of matchstick masts
navigate the thirsty mouth of the harbour,
and my skin drinks it all in.
Sometimes, when I bury myself, in myself.
never quite reaching the point when thinking stops,
I unlatch the door, drink tea, and savour wild berry tart
at Poets Corner,
or stroll to the Spaniard
where the swans dance to Francesca’s mandolin,
and in my solitude I feel quietly content.
I look at life in black and white at The Gallery,
buy a chiffon scarf from Stone Mad,
peacock feathers with hand stitched beads
and fly it like a kite on the beach.
After sundown you’ll find me in The Black Pig
sipping a glass of red,
satisfied with the feeling that finally,
I have arrived.

Homage to Kinsale
Published in Irish Examiner 27/10/2015, Iodine Spring/Summer Issue XVI 2015 Editor- Jonathan K. Rice, Eastern World- Editor Asror Allayarov, Douglas Post Issue 1216 w/e 30/04/2016, Live Encounters December 2016 Editor- Mark Ulyseas

Linda Kinsale Linda Ibbotson was born in Sheffield, England, lived in Switzerland and Germany and travelled extensively before finally settling in County Cork, S. Ireland in 1995. A poet, artist and photographer her work has been published in various international journals including Levure Litteraire, The Enchanting Verses Literary Review, Iodine, Irish Examiner, Asian Signature, Live Encounters, Fekt and California Quarterly. Linda was also invited to read at the Abroad Writers Conference, Lismore Castle, Co. Waterford, Butlers Townhouse, Dublin, and Kinsale, Ireland. One of her poems ‘A Celtic Legacy’ was performed in France at Theatre des Marronniers, Lyon, the village of Saint Pierre de Chartreuse and 59 Rivoli, Paris by Irish actor and musician Davog Rynne. Her painting Cascade has been featured as a CD cover.