Live Encounters Poetry & Writing September 2025
The limits of dis-location, poems by Linda Adair.
Súile gorm dúnta ó glare cerulean
blue eyes shuttered from cerulean glare
In searing cerulean brilliance
you all wonder is this a light of possibility
after months in the half-lit world below
On deck the optic nerves twitch
in the disarming glare of
sunlight dancing on waves
as the boat is anchored
from far away the too-familar grey
of the Workhouse walls rise in your minds eye
Today, the Digby’s manifest declares you were
a housemaid who can read
presumably English
Afterall, the banned language Gaielge
would not be worth considering
from the Empires’ point of view,
Yet you made an illiterate mark
as you disembarked from that first
Earl Grey Scheme ship to sail to Australia.
Why? I want to be able to ask
but of course you do not answer me so many generations gone.
I imagine this is because we do not share the same mother tongue.
The limits of dis-location
in memory of my great great grandmother
You were …
a mere girl
one among 4114 souls
‘rescued’ or trafficked
from that occupied country
to this vast stolen land
over 300 First Nations
díláithrithe / displaced
díbeartha / exiled
díbeartha / banished
You witnessed …
that water-mold
infest bog-land plots
as the ‘late blight’ fed
Sassenach greed and bigotry
and starvation and eviction
swept away resistance
dhaoradh / condemned
dídhaonnaithe / dehumanised
díshealbhaíodh / evicted
You learned …
that choice was easy
if you wanted to stay alive
Earl Grey’s elegant scheme
outsourced the cost
of supporting poor orphan girls
to the insolvent colony
bás / perish
nó / or
daonra an choilíneacht / populate the colony
You escaped …
the last -resort refuge
of Roscommon’s workhouse
arriving in Port Jackson
on the Digby in April 1849
its bounty of young housemaids
resented by the protestant press
bhreithnigh / judged
náire / shamed
doicheall / resented
You muted …
your mother tongue
stilled behind compressed lips
you always answered in broken Bearla
kept your thoughts to yourself
as they whirred in the fluency
of your native Gaeilge.
ina thost / silenced
toirmiscthe / forbidden
shéan / denied
You knew…
your role was
to serve in ciúnas
in boisterous households
where squatters pushed
past ‘The limits of location’
your policeman patrolled.
comhshamhlú / assimilate
eirigh suas / rise up
pósadh / marry
You became a …
bean chéile , mháthair
then widow when carrying
your youngest child
you beloved matriarch
whose calm smile of welcome
was rememberd in the death notices
50 years after you arrived.
I gcuimhne ar mo shin-seanmháthair, Margaret McGarry,
dúchasach de Ros Comáin / In memory of my great great grandmother,
Margaret McGarry, native of Roscommon.
© Linda Adair
Co-editor of Rochford Street Review, Adair is a writer, artist, and activist descended from several Irish refugees, most of whom came from Roscommon and Galway. Two of her great-great-grandmothers were sent to Australia as teenage orphan girls on the Earl Grey Scheme in the wake of An gorta Mor. Their overlooked stories have inspired many of her poems, and she is thrilled and deeply honoured to be able to read at Poetry Plus in Ireland and in Galway at Charlie Byrnes Bookshop event for the National Culture Night on 19 September 2025.
Adair’s poems have been anthologised in OysterCatcher One; To End All Wars; Messages from The Embers; Poetry for the Planet; and published in international journals including Live Encounters Poetry & Writing; FemAsia; The Blue Nib as well as a range of independent Australian journals.
Adair most recently featured at the Winter 2025 Kedumba Gallery Reading; The August Reading held at the Little Lost Bookshop, Katoomba; the Anniversary Reading for (the renewed) 5 Islands Press in Melbourne; and A Gallery of Poets event at Dickerson Gallery. She has read at major events for Melbourne’s 2024 and 2023 Sonic Poetry Festivals; was invited to feature at The Back to Newnes Day in 2023 and presented her work after residencies at the BigCi (Bilpin Internal Ground for Creative Initiatives) and Varuna: the National Writers House.
She was interviewed for 3CR’s Spoken Word program, and has exhibited her poems together with her paintings in both solo and group shows in Sydney, Australia. She has been invited to be a guest poet at the upcoming The Wonderlust Women event in Glasgow.