Live Encounters Poetry & Writing 16th Anniversary Volume Seven
November- December 2025
North and South, poems by Helen Fallon.
Winter Sunday
The sameness of those Ulster Sundays – mass,
dinner, then free to roam fields and laneways,
where we were rooted. Skirting whin bushes,
past a cottage, collapsed in on itself,
white stones like skulls scattered among the ruins.
Our shoes squelch on wet grass.
Through crumbling pillars of an avenue
lined by leafless trees. Branches criss-crossed,
as if praying, shadow the bruised grey sky.
Then past the big house, curtains closed on high
windows: those people go to church not mass.
The gate squeaks as we get out to the road.
Smoke spirals from scattered chimneys, incense
splashed across the sky. A hunched man rattles
past on a blue bike, thin shopping bag hitched
to handle bars. He calls Youse are out late.
We reach the shop. I click the door latch, thump
the wooden counter, smell onions frying.
Betty slouches out, cigarette dangles
from her lips. There’s thirteen dead in Derry.
God and his holy mother protect us.
They’ll be civil war yet.
Magdalen
Da pulls the Moses basket from beneath blue baling twine
in the shed, slams it on the kitchen floor.
Ma weeps as she wipes it down. Tiny fingers rest on rose
patterned blanket, soft breath ripples the wool.
I close my eyes, see the river’s edge, lower the basket
into marsh weeds and yellow flag irises.
Butterflies dance before his opening eyes. A woman
from the big house on the hill hears a cry,
rushes down, marvels at this rose-wrapped gift among the reeds.
She takes him home, raises him as her own.
I hear footsteps creak on the polished boards, a swish
of cloth,
a nun lifts the basket and shuts the door.
The Village of Waiting
A retired librarian, Helen Fallon grew up on the border of Northern Ireland and now lives in Kildare. She began writing in 1991 after returning from working at the University of Sierra Leone. Initially she wrote memoir pieces and short stories. Her work has been broadcast on Sunday Miscellany, Lyric FM and BBC Radio 4. In the last five years she has focused on writing poetry and has published in a number of journals and anthologies. Her poem Shell-Shocked Land was placed second in the Poetry Ireland/Trócaire 2019 poetry competition. She was selected for Poetry Ireland Introductions 2022, and awarded a John Hewitt Summer School Bursary in 2024. Her poems cover a wide variety of themes – Sierra Leone, emigration and immigration, the Northern Ireland conflict and growing up in 1960s rural Ireland, a time when the Catholic church was very influential.