Live Encounters Poetry & Writing March 2025
Old Galway, poems by Rachel Coventry.
Old Galway
He’d thrown something at it
just before we arrived.
Three young women
rushed to defend the marauder.
I pay 100 euros to fish this river
he tells us
his face dark with drink and rage
as if to ask what the seal pays.
But what could he say?
When the bulwark of his anger
Bumped against a monolith
of girlish condemnation.
Your grandfather had died that very morning
I remember him telling me
how this river had run black with salmon
once.
A Walk
We take an impromptu walk together.
You are going to the market to get tomatoes,
eggs from a stack,
a fresh round bread
You Moroccans love your bread, I say,
but you don’t hear because of some little furore.
I am getting in my steps after work.
I carry you in my hand; you carry me in yours.
Among these crooked silhouette trees,
I watch you get on with the business of living,
occasionally grinning down at me in your palm
as the night gathers in around my crown.
You are farther south, in the yellow for now
but it will slant away from you too.
We are both in possession
of our father’s death certificates
For Leigh
When you tell me about the death certificate
I say, me too
as if we’d both visited La Spezia
or liked to eat chia seeds at breakfast
or decided against dying our hair.
In the restaurant, you noted that
we both needed glasses to read the menu
we both have the same Specsavers cases.
We sit in my car at the water’s edge in Cornamona,
a place of no particular significance to either of us,
telling stories of the men we didn’t really know
and the men we did
me too, I say me too.
© Rachel Coventry
Rachel Coventry lives in Galway. Her poems appear in The Guardian, The Rialto, The North, Stand, and The Moth. Her most recent books are “The Detachable Heart” 2022 (Salmon Poetry) and “Heidegger and Poetry in the Digital Age” 2023 (Bloomsbury).