Live Encounters Poetry & Writing September 2025
Nettle, poems by Brian Kirk.
Nettle
What does it mean to feel a sting?
A sign of life or just an ache?
Perhaps it signifies something
that can’t be named, something opaque
like worry, fear or maybe love,
a pinch that urges you to move.
But if I steel my will and grasp
the moment that is offered me,
and even as I swear and gasp
I still may find tranquillity.
Remember how we used to live
before we took what we should give?
Look closer and you’ll see her worth,
a source of food for Tortoisehell,
indicative of fertile earth,
verdant garden damoiselle.
Don’t take this sharp conceit amiss,
her sting is like a lover’s kiss.
Coco
That is the name
they have given me.
A clown’s name –
they have no idea.
They imagine that
I am domesticated,
but I am more wild
than they’ll ever
know. I am Diana,
the hunter, Artemis,
Bastet. My brothers
pulled Freya’s chariot
from battlefields to Fólkvangr.
Pangur Bán was my father.
When they stroke me
I take on their fears.
The wisdom of ages
sleeps in my coat.
Crossing the Thames
The water down below is black as pitch,
the lights from stars and shore blend and bewitch,
making the city seem an eiderdown
on which is draped a silken evening gown –
brocade, studded with silver jewels, hand-sewn.
The dress she wears is dark as chocolate cake
and she is good enough to eat. You slake
your thirst with furtive looks, but still you ache
for all the things that she might let you take.
Hope lives until you reach the other side,
there the world begins or ends – fate will decide –
but you delay the moment, slow your stride,
you want this crossing over to abide
so that your love might live always untried.
© Brian Kirk
Brian Kirk has published two collections with Salmon Poetry, After The Fall (2017) and Hare’s Breath (2023). His poem “Birthday” won Irish Poem of the Year at the Irish Book Awards 2018. His chapbook It’s Not Me, It’s You won the Southword Fiction Chapbook Competition, published by Southword Editions in 2019. His novel Riverrun was chosen as a winner of the IWC Novel Fair 2022.