Guest Poems

The Look I’m thinking of the look a woman gave as the mudslide rushed towards her and she turned her face upwards and threw her baby clear. I’m thinking what the last person who saw her saw in her face. No photo fixes it. No artist had time to paint that look....

Sunflower Down at the pub, the rumours had soon spread : our local farmer’s selling off his land. When goat-man left and pheasant farm shut down, we realised there was truth in what was said. Soon, other tenants left their grazing land – moved horses on, their meadows...

Portuguese Churches They tower on the hilltops of the far Reconquest, Holding up their crosses to the heavens – Tall centuries of flinty faith Piled high to fill the sky with their conviction. Once new, once bright, once bold, They groan now under their own history,...

The Beekeeper She is veiled, white gowned, holding by its neck a metal rooster that clucks with smoke. Under the cottage cheese blossom there’s a fae circle of wooden homes. With a gloved hand she snaps the propolis under the gabled roof; a behemoth bride revealing a...

How to know a bumblebee Try to draw each golden stripe and silver-veined wing each jointed leg and claw, the furry bee-ness of it busy on sun-drenched lavender. Listen to the bombination and buzz of it its hum and hear the voice of summer.

Let it Be Like This The smell will arrive first – ylang ylang, perhaps, or sandalwood. It will be followed by a cloud of a colour never seen before: this will surround me, block the light. Faintly at first I’ll hear music – violins and cellos at the start, then, as...

Moon Landing Some say that it was a hoax, but I remember every moment of when The Men arrived. They set down their craft upon my soft craters. No permission to land requested. Claimed me as though a flag could limit the gravity of my moonlight. A crescent shaped...

Rich and Poor in the Underworld I should choose, so I might live on Earth, to serve as the hireling of another, some landless man with hardly enough to live on, rather than be lord over all the dead that have perished. Odyssey 11, 489 – 491 See this tanned...

Ivy Wreaths are Multiplying by the River in the Woods This is a lonely path, and that’s what I prefer: a chance to watch the dipper in the stream, the deer come down to drink, the wren that bobs along the bank. But lately all my pleasure’s spoiled by ivy wreaths hung...

‘And Yourself?’ ‘Donegal,’ I say. I see the stone and oak pier, Inishboffin, Inishdooey and Tory Island, seals sunbathing on the sandbanks, the sky, blue as a Greek door. I imagine you carrying me, in a hold-all across the dunes to Falcarragh Strand, and then...

Truth The air asks the wind about the silence it carries and the wind scours the mountain for a reply but the mountain looks down on the departing river the river that carries the stone to the fading sea’s edge the stone does not speak of the weight that it carries....

Journey I step into my shadow and the shadow goes away. How many blackbirds are sitting in that tree? If snow fell sideways would the flakes spin or stop? Old cats eat slowly. The colour I most want to inherit is blue, colour of clouds and water. When fog obscures the...

Monkey Night at the Circus Monkey see. Monkey do. Monkey gone. No longer my monkey. No longer my circus. Say goodbye to the red haired clowns, the tension, the drama, the spangled tears. No more balancing on an impossible wire, spinning dizzily up high with no way...

Somewhere to Live I like the way this privet stands its ground, the waist-high lavender, crazy paving, tubs. These winter trees, that never touch, remind me of Mother and the Aunts, how, in the end, I felt their twigs, like children’s fingers, tug. I want to join...

Absence In the quiet forest, nothing stirs. I hear no sigh of leaves, no woodlark’s song, only the moaning of the bracken. I see your boot prints in the sand, puddled with rain, the claws of a dog beside you. Your lips are silent as the pines encircling us. I follow...