Bernadette Gallagher – My love

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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume One December 2022.

My Love, poems by Bernadette Gallagher.

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My love

My love, you are my last and only one,
I belonged to another until you came along.
The ring was on my finger, all glitter and gold.

I sized you, one with the other,
gold weighed more and weighed me down,
your offering was in your smile.

We set up home, dug deep and sowed
your signet ring to me
into the dark earth.

Each year we eat the fruit, seeds burst
on our tongues — we smile with our eyes
planted on one another.

Our little one now grown tall
his home by the river
amongst hazels and birds of the night.

My love, you are my last and only one,
we belong to one another until our time
is done.

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Outside In

Water makes its way from higher land
groove in the earth, a miniature riverbed.

Silt on the roadway outside our gate —
further down, a torrent gushing through veins.

Tortoiseshell butterfly creeps along the floorboards,
awakened out of torpor by heat from room and winter sun.

Hatched from a late July egg under the wings of the stinging nettle,
metamorphoses from caterpillar, pale green with skin

to a pupa hanging like a leaf —

into a butterfly dressed in orange, yellow, and black
bordered with jewels of blue.

Nine months is its lifecycle,
ours just beginning.

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© Bernadette Gallagher

Bernadette Gallagher is a widely published poet from Donegal living in County Cork, Ireland.   bernadettegallagher.blogspot.ie