Tag: Ó Bhéal

“Prostrate” and other poems by Mary O’Connell

May 6th, 2017

The First Cut is…

for Ifrah Ahmed

A fat red sun comes up above the trees.
Ngozi claps her hands, today’s the day
her gran will bring her to Shangazi,
her mother’s aunt.”You must be brave”, they tell
the eight-year-old, who loves to hop and skip
along the dirt-tracks where the lizards play.

They walk for miles, but she discovers tunda;
mangoes and papayas in gran’s cotton bag—
a special treat for this her special day.
gran’s hand tightens as she walks into the house.
The windows are all darkened and a fan
on the ceiling makes a whirring sound.

Then she sees a bed with shiny instruments
and pushes into gran to hide her face.
The old one sits into a wing-backed chair,
cradles Ngozi in her arms and speaks:
“It won’t take long, my love, just look away.”
A touch of steel, and then a scalding pain.

“Now you’ll be ready for your wedding day.”
she hears them shout, as they raise and place her
on the bed, lying on one side, both legs tied.
Tears burn her cheeks, her throat feels sore and dry.
She shivers in the heat and feels betrayed,
invaded by a mutilating blade.

Amaryllis Belladonna

Something rising from the earth invades my life,
flaunts shamelessly in my place of refuge.
For weeks it lay folded in its verdant sheath,
then slowly pushed out its raw obscenity.
Interlocking petals mimicked loudspeakers
that blazed out without warning,
a ‘triffid’ broadcasting calamity.

It stares me down, daring me to look
into its crimson gullet, falling into black.
Yellow stamen at its lip protrude
to mock me with a snide gap-toothed leer.
Why should a gifted pot-plant snarl my peace?
Could the seeds go back to adolescence
coming upon the secret bloom of blood?

Prostrate

The Muezzin’s cry
calls you out of sleep,

you wear a cloth
that cancels all your curves,

walk to the Mosque to find
your place behind the latticed screen,

supplicate heaven
to send no more distress,

the belts of gelignite
that rock the square,

the Prophet’s message twisted in the sand.
fragmented symbols rising in the sand.

Prostrate and other poems is © Mary O’Connell

Mary O’Connell has had poems published in Southword , Best of Irish Poetry 2008, and the Café Review, (Portland ME). She taught languages and English and now lives in Cork city. She also had some success reciting her work in Strokestown and Derry. She has been fortunate to have been mentored by Paddy Galvin and Greg O’Donoghue in a workshop at the Munster Literature Centre, and often writes about nature and classical mythology, as well as taking an ironic look at public figures and events. A regular at O Bhéal, she has twice been asked to read for visiting American students.

“The Devil, Oblique Angles and Polka Dots” by Sue Cosgrave

March 29th, 2017

The Devil, Oblique Angles and Polka Dots

For Grandmother

Your host shimmers
beyond the margin of this page
as my fingers tap-tap you from the dead.

It takes you a while to snap into focus.

You remind me
of a day when I was eight,
or ten, at most,

the day I got lost in the woods.
How I blubbered and wailed for you!

When you finally found me—
a snot and hiccup spewing fountain
– not pretty.

“What took you so long?”

It was strange how you appeared, seemingly out of nowhere;
haloed in spring beyond the green fog of young birches,
your sudden presence, not reassuring – not at first –
“why did you leave me?” I cried

all the while, you, unruffled, reproached me: “Shame on you. A big girl crying
like a baby. And for no reason at all. Don’t you know that God
is watching over you, Detushka?’

Aha! This is where I should invoke the DEVIL.
Yet, there is no need,
for he’s here, already, lurking.
in the detail, wearing

your best navy polka dot dress – what else –
the one you were buried in.
The one you had kept shrouded, when alive,
in a film of translucent tissue.

How well I recall the day:
me, six years old and agog

for the morbid. For hadn’t you whispered to me:
“I’ll tell you a secret – something you should know
for when I’m dead.”
Of course I was disappointed! A DRESS? IS THAT ALL? Polka dots!
What the devil! I should have / could have exclaimed, but sure,
at that age I didn’t know any better.

But no, it is you, not the devil I see hovering just there,
where my eye does not dare
appearing to me as you did that day in the woods:
light streaming over your left shoulder, oblique, aimless—
the light, of course,
not the shoulder, for the shoulder, even lopsided,

knew where it was heading.

Heaven was always your destination,
as I knew only too well.
And I knew, equally well, there was no place for me

astride a puffy cloud my nose buried in your soft breast
gleaning comfort from your old woman smell.

No.

My place was in the woods. Kneeling on a bed
of prickly pine needles.

Of course I hated that icon of yours;
that dead-eyed, flat-faced Madonna
and her miniature child simpering at me in his nakedness
when all I wanted to do was sleep
while you, awake at the crack of dawn, genuflecting

to them,
praying all the while:

I hasten to Thee,
O Master, Lover of mankind, and by Thy loving-kindness I strive
to do Thy work

… and oh, how you worked!
digging the permafrost. Building His canal,
the one that went nowhere.

GLORY, GLORY THE REVOLUTION!

and I pray to Thee: Help me, O God, at all times

Did he ever!
But, perhaps He did, at that.
What is it they say about God and burdens? He did help,
after a fashion:
by the time I was born, your once dainty feet,
He had magic-ed to the size of a man’s,
and your delicate hands to that of shovels.

and deliver me, O God, from every worldly evil thing
and every impulse of the Devil OHO, HERE WE COME
TO THE CRUX OF IT:
WE CAN NEVER ESCAPE THE DEVIL.

Yes, I fed him tasty morsels to do my bidding – unknowingly –
I believe.

I made him promises,
offered him rewards,
without knowing I was doing any such thing. Like the time I cut
my Barbie’s hair for him
(he liked her shorn of course, her eyes, hence, more visibly dead).

You see; the Devil was honest that way. And a good teacher too:
no more worship for me at the altar of Barbie! That’s why
when your icon fell off its perch

I knew IT WAS HIS DOING!

So what if it was my rubber ball that hit the shelf where the icon rested,
Madonna and Child no longer serene above the ever-burning flame?

Sure,
even the Devil needs a helping hand.

The Devil, Oblique Angles and Polka Dots is © Sue Cosgrave

Sue Cosgrave was born in Russia and spent her formative years in the United States, in Iraq and in Finland. After travelling extensively in Asia and the Americas, she worked in various parts of Africa before settling in Ireland. Her work, drawing on many cultural traditions, appeared in the Cork Literary Review, The Five Word Anthology, Can Can, Abridged, The Bone Orchard and The Irish Examiner among others. She featured as a guest reader at various events both in Ireland and the UK. Sue has a Masters in Creative Writing from Lancaster University and is currently working on a trilogy set in Iraq as well as a poetry and a short story collection. In 2016 she was finalist for the Wisehouse International Poetry Award

“Just as the blackbird strikes up his clear note” by C. Murray

November 8th, 2016

From, A Transitory House: A suite of poems performed at Ó Bheal based in Freda Laughton’s Now I am a Tower of Darkness (2016) & first published in 1916 – 2016: An Anthology of Reactions, Editors, John Liddy & Dominic Taylor (Limerick Writers Centre, 2016)

dead hearts, dead dreams, dead days of ecstasy,
Can you not live again ?
Nay, for me never dead.

(Constance Markievicz, Easter Week 1917)

At each day’s dawn,
they came to tell me
they came to tell me
that they would be shot.

I heard the cracking and
I knew my birds had flown.
Willie Pearse, a carver in stone,
shot, his body melted into lime quickly.

I do not know if it was the birds,
that chaos of gulls and crows that
told me they killed James, but then
the screeching stopped.

And that silence, that silence
before the cracking violence
and they came to tell me,
and they came to tell me.

As a child I knew how,
Beyond the lamp’s circuit,
Lay the shadow of the
Shadow of this darkness,

They did not come to see me off.
I stood, and I waited for the order
to be carried out.
They came to whisper their deaths,

no one came for me. I waited,
listening for their songs,
some symbol of their escape
but none came –

I saw Paddy leave through a side gate,
his face clear blown away.
His poor head bowed and I knew
that he too was gone,

Just as the blackbird strikes up his clear note

I saw them injured, tied into chairs.
The soldiers’ guns cocked, ready
no person need tell me, for the birds told me.

Waiting with an arctic kiss
In the well of the staircase,
Ready to drape the bed with visions
No eyelids can vanquish.

The guards whisper their morning blasphemies.
They came to tell me in their proud uniforms,
with their hearts all bloodied, a bloody page.
They melted into the sun, melted through the bars.

Days and days of ravening silences,
and their coming with their songs and their laments.
They came to tell me they were dead
and I was not, and I was.

I waited for it to stop.
I waited for them to come to me
with a bit of paper, the order,
the priest, maybe.
No-one came.

And I saw looking up at my
patch of sky and wondered
why I was not killed,
why I was not let die ?

They came to sing to me with their warm feathers,
their sheaves of nesting,

Now I am a tower of darkness,
whose windows, opening inward,
stare down upon tidal thoughts.
And in this responsive bell,

they came to sing to me,
soft bosomed, purring and burring.
Their young cracking out of eggs
stunned and begging for sun.

They came to tell me,
but before I could make out their words,
I saw them evaporate through the metal grilles,
the shrieking of the carrion crows rises up and above the Liffey

carrying with it their red blood to tell to the river.
I would know without a word the shrieking of their carrion fear,

I did not have to see their iron riddled,
metal punctured hearts to know that their
own sweet ghosts had found the gate.
I sat, I knelt for days of violence and woe,

Hollowed by the silence of the eyes,
The mind swings its clapper.
And life resolves into relationships
Of cadence and dissonance.

And round, with each pace I make,
I feel the terror of their eyes upon me
and my heart speaks that I live, yet I live.

I grieve that they were carried off under warm
sun-warmed wings. Red robed, those flitting birds
out of metal and blood emergent.

They came to sing,
they came to mock,
and to lament.

They came to tell me that they are dead,
and they came to tell me that they are dead.

They came to tell me as they left this realm,
comrades, brothers, I know that you have left
and not one of you tucked me beneath
your endless sunlit wing.

I know the meaning of fear, it is solitude.

As a child I knew how, beyond the lamp’s circuit, lay the shadow
of the shadow of this darkness,
my tower of darkness, my griefs whirl round it
as the sea gyrates round the grey rocks, the green.

Miles away the sea calls me lashing its tumults,
carrying those soaring birds in its streams and eddies,
they call those that are found again,
that none may flounder at the eyries.

And,
dead hearts, dead dreams, dead days of ecstasy,
Can you not live again ?
Nay, for me never dead.

Now I am a tower of Darkness

by Freda Laughton

As a child I knew how,
Beyond the lamp’s circuit,
Lay the shadow of the shadow
Of this darkness,

Waiting with an arctic kiss
In the well of the staircase,
Ready to drape the bed with visions
No eyelids can vanquish.

Now I am a tower of darkness,
whose windows, opening inward,
stare down upon tidal thoughts.
And in this responsive bell,

Hollowed by the silence of the eyes,
The mind swings its clapper.
And life resolves into relationships
Of cadence and dissonance.