Live Encounters Poetry & Writing August 2025
Best Eaten Cold, poems by Geraldine Mills.
Best Eaten Cold
When you came back,
the sky was the same colour
as the mackerel I served you
on that old copper plate.
The dog slept in its paws by the fire,
didn’t lift its head.
So long since we had sat and eaten like this,
you licking the fish juice off the plate
with your scarred finger,
telling me that since you left that day,
you had been losing
little pieces of yourself,
not knowing where they had gone
or how to bring them back.
You cried because you could no longer
hear the night fall,
years since you saw the wind,
or tasted the dazzle of stars.
In a Fifties Photograph
The old black and white photo jogs no memory
until digitised to colour. Suddenly there we all are:
dressed up for the races in our Sunday going-to-mass clothes,
our father in his brown suit, our mother in her best costume,
my younger sisters in fancy plaid rigouts
sent over in a parcel from the Bronx.
But it’s my own dress that flames with the past:
peach and blue tea roses swirling
around the bodice, the standy-out skirt,
the one mother made for me
when she cycled against the wind into Galway
and bought that length of fabric in Brennan’s shop,
fire-damaged stock sold off for a pittance.
She cleared the kitchen table of breakfast things
and with our only scissors (wiped clean of chicken feathers)
cut out the pattern already drawn in her head.
With a whole world threaded through the eye of her needle,
she matched flower to flower along each sleeve,
shaped the neckline, scalloped the collar,
singing away the telltale whiff of smoke,
the singed edges. Singing.
© Geraldine Mills
Geraldine Mills is a poet and fiction writer from the west of Ireland. She has published six collections of poetry, three of short stories and two children’s novels. Her fourth short story collection, Survival Games, will be published by Arlen House in the autumn.
I just love these two poems Geraldine.