Showing posts with label Medbh McGuckian. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Medbh McGuckian. Show all posts

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Top o' the Morning!

             And Happy St. Patrick's Day to You.

clip art painting of brick old weir bridge across the river

Allow me to introduce Poetry Ireland, an organization dedicated to developing, supporting and promoting poetry throughout Ireland. They produce two regular publications, Poetry Ireland Review and Poetry Ireland News. Both are well worth checking out, and there is much more on offer, so hop on over.




In the meantime, how about some poetry.
She wears the Sky

The horizon line embraces the drowsy river docks:
The deep peacock patch of water reaching the dark
Blends with it.
The hills pick up a saintly pallor
From the skin of one doing penitence.
The swallows linger on, as if they forgot.
I gaze into the sealed eyes of my mother,
Seen, not visited, not forgotten,
In the centre of her own picture,
Who wove her own background
With no Martha-work to be done,
As women look when they return to their places
Errorless after Communion.
In her rare low moods
She remembers the next five days as twelve
And compares an unheard of number of things
To be abreast of the incurable
Having no choice but to return
To the end of thought.
In the evenings I can switch the light on from indoors
To illuminate the shroud
Of irises over the urn of jasmine.



And may the saddest day of your future be no worse than the happiest day of your past.

Monday, July 5, 2010

from THE DRESSING ROOM

by Medbh McGuckian
Left to itself, they say, every foetus  
would turn female, staving in, nature  
siding then with the enemy that
delicately mixes up genders. This
is an absence I have passionately sought,  
brightening nevertheless my poet’s attic  
with my steady hands, calling him my blue  
lizard till his moans might be heard  
at the far end of the garden. For I like  
his ways, he’s light on his feet and does  
not break anything, puts his entire soul  
into bringing me a glass of water,

I can take anything now, even his being  
away, for it always seems to me his  
writing is for me, as I walk springless  
from the dressing-room in a sisterly  
length of flesh-coloured silk. Oh there  
are moments when you think you can  
give notice in a jolly, wifely tone,  
tossing off a very last and sunsetty
letter of farewell, with strict injunctions  
to be careful to procure his own lodgings:
that my good little room is lockable,  
but shivery, I recover at the mere  
sight of him propping up my pillow.

from Selected Poems,  Copyright © 1997.

Saturday, April 17, 2010

WORKING THE GARDEN IS BETER THAN THERAPY

garden glimpsed through archway

Garden Homage        
by Medbh McGuckian

Three windows are at work here, sophisticated
spaces against the day, against the light.
The sky looks as if it has been added later
to a glimpsed world as nobody saw it.

Small gaps of awkwardness between overlapping leaves
bring their time to us, as we our time
to them. The hand alone is amazing,
the skull and the owner’s hand holding it,

together on a page for fifty years,
with the earliest smile. A rope vase
of flowers returns the angels
to the ground, that still beautiful brown.


from: The Book of the Angel. Copyright © 2005 Medbh McGuckian.