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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing July 2023
Scully, poems by Roisín Browne.
Scully
For Martin DePorres Wright
Ten thousand circled suns
cathedral forests crumbled
rotted, layers, on layers, on layers
rain deluged terma, mulched soil
skeletal animals, tibia, fibula, butter boxes, tribal bodies,
preserved and mingled underfoot
sleán cut silky sods
hand-turned, footed, dried,
countless summers, aching backs
engines came
dug deeper down to granite bed,
now
scarred peat skin
tattoos the earth
the moisture leaves it
a breath and sculpt
a turn and tug
dress a khadi landscape
cotton remnants meld brown and verdant
deep into ancient strata
gossamer gold emerging.
Clamber Music
He sits by the fire remnants
legs askew, one hobnail on, one off
blackened stubble sprouting
a two-day blackbrush pattern emerging
his head fuzzy from the day before
mouth dry as grain sackcloth
tired hands tremble like newborn chick fur
pans, pots and ladles are scattered on the ground
symptoms of a poitín night purge
he lifts a copper pot
soldered seams in place
good for a hundred years
crafted by his journeyman hand
it catches the shadow of him
a rusty, mottled hulk
he taps this mirror with his yellowed nail
then throws it out of sight
makes clamber music as it rolls
© Roisín Browne
Roisín Browne lives in Rush, Co Dublin and has been published in A New Ulster, The Galway Review, The Stony Thursday Book, Live Encounters Poetry & Writing, Poetry NI, The Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Flare and Echoes from the Castle Anthology. She was commended in the Gregory O’Donoghue Awards in 2018 and shortlisted in The Seventh Annual Bangor Poetry Competition in 2019.
Oh, wow! These are strong images for a fragile beautiful world, and its people!