Guest Poems

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...

Sea-Roads I have come to talk to you Because the days draw in And because I can hear the sea – The distant, long sigh of it. I hear the gull-cry. But mostly, I hear the sea. And, farthest of all, the thunder The ominous deep dirge of it: A shape on the mind’s horizon,...

Blue Moon Once, after the tail-end of a hurricane had blown through the day – the roaring in the trees like a passing train and the rain berserk as it over-ran the valley – once there was this quiet October evening, two full moons in one month, two lives wrought into...

In Churchill’s The boy in the fish and chip shop once felt sad enough to slice the soft white skin on the inside of his wrist. He has a thick scar shining wide and purple like a fat worm sliding up his sleeve. You’ll see a flash of it as he deftly shovels and shakes...

Cracks Like a row of graves the shrunken pots of paint line the windowsill each one sits on a pale strip painted by you. You asked me too many times what shade I wanted for our naked bedroom all the colours looked the same. Your favourite was eggshell white – you said...