Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume One November-December 2024
Lá*, poems by Roisín Browne.
*Lá is the Irish for day.
Lá*
I take a walk on the seventeenth day of March to fresh, green, fields, with bluebells and daffodils bobbing in an easy wind. I look across the dipping land, to the horizon cutting sky and Irish sea, and think Thank God I was born here, free.
In another land to the East, on a Mediterranean Sea there is no green, but broken shards among obliteration. Dust and death the only food to eat. And to the West of me, an emerald shamrock bowl being offered in a large White House. We speak.
Words cannot free, so it seems. Yes, who are we? A dust mite of a nation, while today, the globe goes green.
I take a breath, shake my soul at this idyllic scene, feel sick, look out to sea.
On delivering turf
It’s nine days into July and there’s a Status Yellow rain warning.
I’ve laid sods of Island turf on wet grass, against a wooden suburban fence.
One log on top of the other, to create a stacked square.
The grass gleams against the deep brown.
It makes for a perfect Insta post.
Tomorrow I will deliver this turf,
to a coffee shop in Swords,
to a man, whose middle name, mirrors the middle name,
of a man from Peru. An alchemist of earth,
he will take these sods,
break them back down,
create black butter, and turn it to gold
recalling, hot, honey days,
where boggy ground and green swatches,
glistened yellow, for us all
© 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, Poem Alone, The Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Flare, Black Nore Review, Ragaire Literary Magazine and Mnemotope. She was commended in the Gregory O’Donoghue Awards in 2018, shortlisted in The 7th Annual Bangor Poetry Competition in 2019 and was highly commended in the Seán Dunne Inaugural Poetry Award 2024. You can find Roisín here @ismiseroisinbrowne.