Amanda Bell – Before I knew things ended

 

 

Taut from the stretch, this middle bit:

half-drawn curtains could mean dawn or dusk,

traffic hum an endless drone

along the city streets.

Every midpoint marks a weakness 

strained to breaking; caught

between hanging on and letting go;

propping up the faded plants, 

not sowing them anew.

In the middle, blurred and open-pored,

reflections on the green canal

might seem like missing friends, and absence

keeps us clinging to last straws,

afraid to face the chuckling gulls 

atop the chimney stacks, new tenants 

moving in by dribs and drabs, 

as if they had invented coupledom.

In a world that feels poised on its fulcrum

doggedly standing its ground, 

something waits for a rush of abandon, 

to sheer off, relinquish the hold.

 

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One for Sorrow

To invoke the household gods requires
a lidded pot for keeping incense sweet,
an airtight tub for salt that it may flow,
a receptacle with pouring lip for wine,
a shallow dish to proffer gifts
of incense, resins, powders, herbs;
a burner filled with sand,
a sacred light,
and likenesses of ancestors.

Will these appease the chimney sprite –
this air-light totem, trapped
behind the baffle, wings held high,
with black-pierced eyes and bare-skinned skull
as fragile as a puff-ball?
I held him like an infant, laid him out
beneath the trees, half hoping he’d ascend.
But next day he lay there, limply,
souring on the dew-drenched lawn.

---

Labyrinth

Just you and me, Mother, on a trip to Knossos Palace;
leaving father and brother at the beach, we bussed
from Heraklion in crackling heat, to marvel
at amphorae, crystal vials, and Bronze Age plumbing.

You bought us postcards as mementos: frescoes
of blue dolphins, athletes goading a piebald bull,
gold pendant flanked by bees, a battered ivory statue –
his remaining arm extended in a never-ending fall.

I knew of the Minotaur held captive in the cave,
the fourteen sacrificial tributes sent from Athens,
but had not considered how to navigate a maze
or the vital role of Ariadne’s spool of thread –

granddaughter of the Sun God, herself a Goddess
of the Moon, though little we knew of that, then.

---

© Amanda Bell

Amanda Bell is an award-winning poet, writer and editor. Her publications include Riptide and First the Feathers (poetry collections from Doire Press, 2021 and 2017); The Lost Library Book, the true story of an ancient book missing from Marsh’s Library (Onslaught Press, 2017); Winter Heliotrope, a collaboration with Donald Teskey RHA (Fine Press Poetry, 2023), and Revolution (wildflower poetry press, 2022).

She transcreated Gabriel Rosenstock’s book-length sequence Sasquatch into English (The Loneliness of the Sasquatch, Alba Publishing, 2018). Her collection Undercurrents (Alba Publishing, 2017) won the Kanterman Merit Book Award and was shortlisted for the Touchstone Distinguished Books Award. A section of it, featuring the River Poddle, has been used as a sound walk by Dublin City Council’s Biodiversity Artist in Residence, Rosie O’Reilly, and is available on the ‘Dublin City Trails App’.

Amanda’s work has been broadcast on Sunday Miscellany, Lyric Notes, Keywords, and podcasts for the Royal Irish Academy’s podcaster in residence Zoe Comyns. An assistant editor of The Haibun Journal, she is currently working on historical fiction, and received Literature Bursaries from the Arts Council of Ireland in bursaries in 2020, 2022 and 2023. She is a professional member of the IWC and the AFEPI.