Poetry Ireland

WEEKEND POETRY PROMPTS FOR POETRY IRELAND

/ deuxiemepeau / 5 Comments

 

Poet in Residence at Poetry Ireland Catherine Ann Cullen (@tarryathome) sets daily poetry prompts for adults and kids to keep everyone creative during the Covid pandemic and this weekend I am the guest Poetry prompter.

There are prompts for adults and for kids and you can post your poems on my link on twitter (@deuxiemepeau) or post a copy here and I will post them on twitter for you if you want to take part.

The poetry prompt (NodFilíochta in Irish) for adults is Island (oileán). Your dream escape, your home or how it feels to be currently isolated islands.

For kids the prompt is either SnowPerson (DuineSneachta) or SandCastle (CaisleánGainimh). Which would tour child build first?

Come join in the creativity or come along and read the gems by other writers. See you on Twitter for @PoetryIreland 

 

ORIGINAL SONGS

/ deuxiemepeau / 3 Comments

 

Here now, flown back to nest since moved in absence,
these streets hold no shadows of my former shyness,
they do not call me by nickname, or your name.
I was never open enough then to be called by your name,
their name, his name, back then when there was no him
and barely a me.
Here now, back to where they began, before me-
their nests, their streets, their lanes, their stories
I’ve since borrowed, not knowing much of my own,
those told before me.
Funny now, to be here, in this nest, perched on this position,
you say it’s home and there’s truth in those words
but it’s like saying we’re family- this was never my home
and our blood is not the same.
We look out at the same land, the same tree, the same leaf
but we do not perceive the same stars at night
when the garden is gone and the universe asks
where did you come from?
We are what we believe. We come back to what we know
regardless of where we’ve been, of who we’ve become.
Of where we started. Adoption can be a cold word
to begin with.
I came from a broken shot off cupid’s bow where a single tear
flooded the moonlight as a siren screamed and one other,
lost to her first song, called out for another chance to hold
a snowflake in her hands. We were both born to sing
in seasons different to our own.
I came back on a wing’s turn to question the concept
of a nest, of where feather first found flight, I came back
older, taller, wiser, to look at youth from this odd angle
of middle age, to look at connection from the perspective
of having already left the nest, to sit, here now, in this garden
freshly trimmed down and cast this bird’s eye view
over where the roots were first planted
and who laid the first twig.

   

All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

A QUESTION OF POMEGRANATE ANSWERS

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I saw you first in a library,
in a bound book on front of the light,
as if you needed to ripen any further.
My first book, bound and borrowed
from a library, was Mrs. Potter’s
inquisitive rabbit Peter, all eager
to explore the taste of all he could
not yet name. We’re like that, children-
eager for the answer before we’ve
really come to consider the question.
I ask myself more now, at this midway
through the darkness than I ever did
then, where all was so seemingly light.
Yesterday, in the garden my youth
once played on, that time has now
returned to consider, an eager rabbit
came out to play and I asked if perhaps
there was camomile in the cupboard.

No, but there’s a pomegranate
in the pantry

came the reply.

And I looked at Peter and laughed
like I’d taken you from the bookshelf
in that light library, that day and smiled
as I turned your pages that held just
as many questions as there were answers.

 

For Eavan Boland. 

Words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly. 

THE LIGHT INSIDE THE BOOKS

/ deuxiemepeau / 3 Comments

 

I found where they keep the light-
here, at the far end of the long road,
just up from childhood summers
near slip-away shores,
contained in a considered space
where books are bound to interest
and cosy corners tipped
in velveteen seductions of blue
that does anything but chill.
Funny,
to find this here, where once this structure
of simple stone held such complicated
conditioning, home once to a bigger book
you daren’t touch and a language
no one understood,
where they performed shows on Sundays
with their asses to the audience,
rattling off the auld Latin, the trail
of the Tridentine, without a single
Shakira shake.

Funny,
to find all this here, now,
this room of light and lending,
where knowledge can be found and held
and taken home and thought about
and brought back, without any penance
or concept of confession, for the next
and the next again.
Funny,
what you find when you let in the light.

 

All words and photographs by Damien B Donnelly

FREEDOM IS A WISH ON THE WIND

/ deuxiemepeau / 3 Comments

 

I steal
deep into space, in the far field-
inches are miles these days
and miles can hold worlds.
I kick
imaginary balls into empty posts
and run tracks that dig circles
around the turns I cannot take.
The eye spots
white specs, like snowflakes, dancing
on the far side of deep ditches-
daisies making their own chains
while
les dents de lion
cast their own wishes out
into a breeze that knows no boundary.

 

All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

SEA AND SAND

/ deuxiemepeau / 7 Comments

 

Sand slips under foot like memory into mind,
waves wash up along a country lane leading down
into a secreted sea, past a thistle that pricks not;

so much beauty cannot bear a beast.

There is breath in these back fields I recall
on the curve of this spiral game, returning like these tides
that tickle the familiarity that floats on the foam
of the waves I once forged freedom on,

getting far enough out just to find my way back in.

Home is not something you recognise until you return,
like the smell of this sea stretching out to islands
that look in on me, as if trying to find a way to connect,
home is not something you miss until you swim out,

not something you recognise until the tide takes you back in
to that secreted sea, stashed away down a country lane
and you recall

how the sand once felt under foot.

 

All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

THE POLITICS OF A SHAMROCK

/ deuxiemepeau / 11 Comments

 

We stopped the telly and the tea to watch the thunder
on Thursday; 1-100, 2-100, 3-100 we counted
in between the light growing dimmer and that storm,
coming closer.

We watched from distant windows, catching breaths
in between fears of catching colds while next-door
neighbours pulled curtains over concerns, here,
in a country where we thank the drivers of busses,
a country now the bearers of the cleanest of bottoms
whose aisles run empty
while out in the fields I see nothing but bounty.

I wish I had a river I could skate away on- I hear
the song but we can’t all slip upstream like the salmon,
these are not the days of the dance
and knowledge, until captured, is not a cure.

We packed up Patrick and his party with handshakes
and other saints for other seasons,
swapped the shamrock for a dozen hand sanitisers
and will drown out all fear in Dettol this year.

We stopped the telly and the tea last Thursday
to take stock of the storm, trying to capture
in the sky all we couldn’t see with our eye,
and all I saw was an eagle;
sitting shameless with a bowl of shamrocks
by an orange coloured man in a white house,
a far cry from the panic raining over my house.

We stopped the tea on Thursday to watch the thunder.

 

All Words and Watercolours by Damien B Donnelly.

 

Written as part of the Cobh Writers and Readers #PoetryPrompt featured on Twitter. Do drop by and join in the creative distraction. @CobhWR or follow the link below…

https://paperneverrefusedink.com/2020/03/14/cobh-readers-and-writers-writing-prompts/

 

1847.1490.164

/ deuxiemepeau / 5 Comments

 

Slow is the swan along these tracks well torn,

my feet tire in soft shoes that follow google
as scavengers’ swim in closer to my scraps-
braver the bird when hunger’s the only hold.

Swift runs the water as if it didn’t want to stay,

there are locks but not all lakes can be held,
not every belly can hold so much emptiness
and Naomi not the sweet swan to set you free.

Slow is the pace from midland to new world,

a shot rings out, rumbles from feather to wave-
but too late is the fall for the rest who fell,
bodies are buried at sea and only time forgets.

In 1847, the worst year of the Great Irish Famine, 1490 tenants were evicted from the estate of Denis Mahon in Strokestown and escorted 167km on foot along the Royal Canal to Dublin where they were shipped off to Liverpool and from there put onto ships, like The Naomi, setting off for the New World. Denis Mahon was later assassinated in November of the same year while almost 1/3 of those who set out on the route to Dublin, the coffin ships and Canada never made it.

 

 

All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

RANDOM REASONS

/ deuxiemepeau / 9 Comments

 

I live in a country
where people say thank you
to the drivers of busses-

honestly.

In the mornings, on school runs
and city excursions,
a country where people say thank you
to the drivers of busses,
even at middle door exits
where they’ll nod, all the same,
to the front, to the driver
in that cordoned-off cabin-
in case of commotion-
they’ll throw down a gesture
or the wink of an eye
that says thank you for the bus ride,
that says thank you to the driver
of the bus who’s inside.

I live in a country
with those giggling girls
I could’ve clattered this morning,
those giddy little girls with their gangly limbs
which they swung across aisles
like granny’s long knickers
in the garden on lines,
swaying our patience
off the handrails, this morning
like J-Lo’s but younger.

I live in a country
where these 5-year-old rascals,
who I pictured pounding beaches
for equally thick things to trample,
all scurried off the step
while saying thank you to the driver
of the bus they’d just battered,
Thank you, sir they said
and then jumped into a puddle
and splattered.

I live in a country
where people say thank you
to the drivers of busses

and I realise why I came home.

 

All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

 

Audio available on Soundcloud:

CATCHING THE RECALL

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They come and go,
playing tag with the tide,
swimming in to touch
but the ocean is an elastic

to recall.

We came here once,
a love of youth’s illusions,
dipping our skinnies
before I lost you on a breath

without recall.

It comes and goes;
that tide, his touch, this time,
so many currents
congregating under clouds

that can’t be caught.

 

All words and photographs by Damien B Donnelly