Doireann Ní Ghríofa

A dark November evening
in the house of my grandmother
sharp skeletons of trees
scraped and creaked,
scratching window panes.
Folded within her old shawl,
I sat by the range, turf glowing red
behind the black—toothed grimace
of the grate. Around me, they murmured,
weaving the endless web of scuffles, scandals,
schedules of funerals, of news from those
in Australia and America
and the lives of locals, of old friends and enemies,
centuries of our blood mingled, mixed
in this rough, rocky soil.
I nestled further into my nook
sombre orphan
pressed my cheek to her chest
until all I heard was the steady, sturdy
thump of her heart, the ebb and flow
of ceaseless tide, an echo
crashing through cliff caves.
...

It was dusk when I arrived
to a house of strangers
who say they are my people
their grasping hands,
their screeching fiddles,
their squawking accents.
I soon backed away
closed the door on their merriment.
Alone,
I lift my poor possessions
from the trunk
push aside blankets and clothes
and lay each small treasure
on the cupboard
one by one:
the brush,
the locket,
the bible,
this diary.
Standing,
I pull the pins from my hair
raise the brush
unravel each tangled strand.
I place my palm
on the fogged wall mirror
in this foreign home
of forgotten foremothers.
Beyond my reflection,
startled starlings explode
from the branch of a tree
like feathered shrapnel
soaring towards me.
The past is a cloud
from which my soul rained.
Who might I be, if here
she had stayed?
...

They stand on the windowsill now, long empty
Three tall jam jars, their labels yellowed, faded by sunlight
the careful curlicues of a stranger's hand no longer legible.
The neighbours still talk of their arrival from America
when I was a child. They describe the jars clean, clear, then
brimming with jams and jellies. They tell of that strange sweetness,
the texture on the tongue. They recall the strange names of fruits
that grew under a faraway foreign sun, were stewed in sugar there,
preserved and packed and travelled across oceans to be tasted here.
Iwatch them shake their heads in wonderment.
Alone, I hold a jar to the light and imagine the glow
of those faraway fruits and berries, pushing their childish
cheeks to the glass, peering out at this new world.
I press my lips to the glass, breathe, and push my fingertips
to that fogged frost to write the letters that spell my name.
Sometimes, I whisper my secrets into their open mouths,
and screw the steel lids on tight to trap my breath inside.
They preserve my imagined memories in their emptiness.
...

He knew.
Even as a boy in his father's currach,
He knew. He knew that the sea
would someday grasp him in her terrible teeth, destroy him,
drown him in her salted grief, her embrace wet and wide
as the slow dawn of death in the eye of a fish.
He knew. He knew it as he built the currach, as he
curved each slender rib of wood and covered it
in canvas as bleak and black as a mourning gown
pulled over slender shoulders. He knew
that someday it would buck like a colt
and hurl him into dark water. He knew.
Even as he married me, loved and laughed
and poured a baby into me, he knew.
He knew as he surged through sea-swell,
seeking to fill his nets with silver.
He knew, and still he refused to learn to swim,
for the struggle against his lot could only prolong his agonies.
He knew. He knew our lives together could never be long.
That by the time our child was born he would be long gone.
He knew. He knew. He knew.
...

This little thimble was never worn to work,
so why did you insist that I keep it with me?
Tiny shield of steel. I keep it in my pocket,
my amulet against hardship.
When things get dark, I bite my lip and slip
my finger into this silver shell. Sometimes,
I wonder if you wore it before you died,
whether your fingerprints might still be stitched inside.
...

IRISH WRITERS, IRISH WRITING, POETRY
Two poems by Doireann Ní Ghríofa
Museum

I am custodian of this exhibition of erasures, curator of loss.
I watch over pages of scribbles, deletions, obliterations,
in a museum that preserves not what is left, but what is lost.

Where arteries are unblocked, I keep the missing clots.
I collect all the lasered tattoos that let skin start again.
In this exhibition of erasures, I am curator of loss.

See the unraveled wool that was once a soldier's socks,
shredded documents, untied shoestring
knots — my museum protects not what is left, but what is lost.

I keep deleted jpegs of strangers with eyes crossed,
and the circle of pale skin where you removed your wedding ring.
I recall all the names you ever forgot. I am curator of loss.

Here, the forgotten need for the flint and steel of a tinderbox,
and there, a barber's pile of scissored hair. I attend
not what is left, but what is lost.

I keep shrapnel pulled from wounds where children were shot,
confession sins, abortions, wildflowers lost in cement.
I am custodian of erasures. I am curator of loss
in this museum that protects not what is left, but what is lost.
...

In the frozen foods aisle, I think of him
when I shiver among shelves of green flecked
garlic breads and chunks of frozen fish.
I touch the cold door until my thumbs numb.

Strangers unpacked his body in a lab
and thawed his hand, watched long-frozen fingers
unfurl one by one, until his fist finally opened,
let go, and from his grasp rolled
a single sloe,
ice-black with a purple-blue waxy bloom.

Inside the sloe,
a blackthorn stone.
Inside the stone,
a seed.

Standing in the supermarket aisle,
I watch my breath freeze.
...

In a vintage boutique on Sullivan's Quay,
I lift a winter coat with narrow bodice, neat lapels,
a fallen hem. It is far too expensive for me,
but the handwritten label

[1915]

brings it to my chest in armfuls of red.
In that year, someone drew a blade
through a bolt of fabric and stitched
this coat into being. I carry it
to the dressing room, slip my arms in.
Silk lining spills against my skin. I clasp the belt
and draw a slow breath as a cramp curls again,
where blood stirs and melts. In glass,
I am wrapped in the weight of old red:

red pinched into girl cheeks
and smeared from torn knees,
lipstick blotted on tissue,
bitten lips, a rough kiss,
all the red bled into pads and rags,
the weight of red, the wait for red, that we share.


In the mirror, the old coat blushes.
This pocket may once have sheltered something
precious — a necklace, a love letter, or
a fresh egg, feather-warm, its shell brittle
around a hidden inner glow, held loosely
so it couldn't crack, couldn't leak through seams,
so it couldn't stain the dress within.
...

o aluminium roll,
o silver scroll

confined in
this cupboard,

bound in cardboard,
restrained behind

a jagged blade that tears
lengths away to mute

the bowls and
jars of the fridge —

o small,
spare life.

I would free it, the tinfoil. I'd lift it from its cabinet and make
a river of it, a smooth, grey sheen released through the house.

At the summit of the stairs, the source would spurt up
from Gougane Barra, setting a mountain stream to gush, and I'd lift it

and give it a push, I'd let the bright waters of the Lee flow down
the slope, to run a silver ribbon through the hall. Under the bridge

of a couch, I'd watch shadows of salmon and brown trout swim in
and out of riverweed. On a moonlit night, a man might stand there

with his son, the light of their torches poaching the waters. If the child
whispered "Oh look, the river's smooth as tin foil!" his father

would hush him quickly, finger to lip, and turn to choose a hook.
The waters would surge onwards, swirling under doors to the city

-kitchen. Where gulls screech and shriek high, I would thrust swifter
currents that'd make islands of table legs and riverbanks of walls.

I'd give the river a voice to hum through the culverts that run under
cupboards, making of itself a lilting city song, its waters speckled

with gloom-shadows of mullet. I would put a single seal there,
lost, and make a red-haired girl the only person who'd see him.

I would tug that river back, then, the weight of all its stories
dragging after it, and haul it in loud armfuls all the way back to me.

Shrunken,
crumpled,

torn, I'd
fold it, then,

and close
it back in

its press
again.
...

No slender thread,
no telephone cord
binds us anymore.
Now that our computers call each other,
I can't
press your voice to my ear.
No longer can I hear you breathe. Now, we are bound only
by a weak connection
and we break up
and break up
and break up.
...

I

In pregnancy, a woman carries
a baby's ovaries like little fists

on fallopian wrists; inside each handful,
a million oocyte cells, microscopic pips.

In this, a mother is the eggshell
that carries her descendants.



II

Two weeks before Christmas, I am holding
a string of silver tinsel when the phone rings.
The landlord wants our home for his son.
I drop the tinsel. He gives us a month.

On supermarket shelves,
my fingers hover over freckled eggs
nestled in cardboard.
Within each shell,

chalazae threads, lustrous
filaments that grip each membrane
to its yellow orb, lifting each yoke
up, to hold it steady in a liquid glut.


III

I search websites for houses to rent
but everything is too expensive.
I distract myself with old photos instead,
clicking
Evicted family at Glenbeigh, 1888
to find a shattered cabin, a man, a woman,
four barefoot children. I peer at the girl's
hands, but can't quite discern what she holds,
a pale apron, perhaps, or a fistful of wool.
Her hand exists only in pixels now, this girl
who arrives by retina and optic nerve
to live a while in my mind. I realise,
then, what she holds in her hand.
I recognise its freckled skin.
I know its cargo of liquid, its chalazae grip.
I know the gold that floats within.
...

Home from hospital, you doze in my arm, milk-drunk,
all eyelashes, cheeks and raw umbilical, swaddled
in the heavy black smells of the brewery.

Your great-grandfathers worked all their lives in that factory.
Every day they were there, breathing the same air, hoisting
barrels, sweating over vats where black bubbles rose like fat.

At dusk, they poured into pubs and ordered porter,
neat black pints lidded with white silk, thick as cream
from frothing milk, and their replies were always the same:

the gasp, the nod. Down gullets and guts went the porter,
went the pay, went the nights and days. Every day
the same — coins slapped on the counter. No change.

In my arms, you stir. A thousand streetlamps
flicker to light in the dusk. As I watch your eyes open,
the reek of roasting hops knits a blanket of scent around us.
...