Live Encounters Poetry & Writing July 2025
A Year Gone, poems by Robyn Rowland.
A Year Gone
Four we are in the boat, rocking through the mouth
of our small harbour you loved, heading to where
you fished over sixty years, and me a child with you
then. Maybe an hour in, you’d return me.
Green-gills, white cheeks, I’d walk home,
vomit at the corner of the church, whose steeple
you repaired, reshaped, repainted with Desi Cox –
remains slightly squew-whiff you’d grin, winking.
Never impatient with fishing, though not so
with cards, you’d watch me heading up along
the slipway, then curve round, back out to
the reef, bringing schnapper home for tea.
This last ritual I now create,
modern times being bereft of such things.
We’re ready, a yellow rose each, Sue with
lemon verbena from Dunsters’ farm,
me with a knotted inch cut from my hair
to keep you from being alone out there.
Two boatmen we tried for the task,
and the surf club, but everywhere, rules.
Then Tony found your man, Ivor.
Unknown to us he’d worked with you
at Tallawarra, would take nothing for
the petrol, for taking a good man out to sea.
He says there are dolphin pods everywhere
today, and wide schools of overfat fish.
He says, I’ll steer along the stretch and
you find the place when you’re ready.
Tears are rippling the edges of my eyes:
his kindness, the salt spray, the momentary
ridge of dolphin fins chasing down shawls.
We can see boats out past the dark water.
They’re marlin-hopping, and on the rocks inshore
at Bass Point people are hoping for bream.
They line up like an avenue of saluting rods,
honour guards, both horizons.
And now that sense of urgency that signals yes,
here. We laugh at how hard it is to open
this box of your ‘excess ashes’.
But I’m sure, doing what I’ve wanted all along.
Casting them overboard, flower heads bloom
into the mirrored sky. With slight tremble
I spill you out, expecting you’ll float about a bit,
crinkle down onto the ocean floor, settle.
But a startling swirl of the petals, a whorl
threading a constellation of golden flecks
into the salt, and you’re off, shooting along
with a comet’s tail. So fast you go,
sweeping away like a young lad glad to be free.
Ah, says Ivor, he’s going south with the Eastern
Current. Good choice Norm, raising his hand;
mine, suddenly empty. And you are gone.
After the Carnage
Relaxed in Coole Park, we sit and listen to the Irishman
weave his voice into Eric Bogle’s song All The Fine Young Men,
and it saddens breath, a helpless kind of sorrow.
We drink wine from allies in trade, Germany and France,
in company with the bemused ghost of Lady Gregory’s
airman son, Robert, who crashed spinning into dust, Italy, 1918.
And in the town of Çanakkale on the Dardanelles
we buy bullet key-rings a boy sells on the boat to Gallipoli,
and small wooden images of Mehmetçik, the Turkish soldier
carrying his wounded ‘enemy’ Johnny Mehmetçik (Tommy,
Digger), away from the sunlit slash of bayonet.
Cash tills bulge in cafes through the villages of Ypres
where my grandfather was shot in his right thigh,
ferried through tent hospitals to Britain, then back to France.
His body managed bullet, Spanish flu, appendicitis, damaged
back from a fall in a trench, from a truck, on a ridge of bones.
And he never spoke on any of it.
And never marched to commemorate, unsure the purpose.
But he would love my Turkish sister-in-law as I do,
and the blossoms that flower from our shared branches.
Now that war is tourism – music, art, even my own poems –
and the stain that ran in the fabric of those empires fades, I wonder,
in the din of battle, in following orders to kill, to be killed,
is this what they imagined, after – all those fine young men?
Fear Works
It’s a small Irish town, not the Türkiye
I’ve travelled hurriedly from,
where bombs were shocking Ankara apart,
children marching for peace,
blown to shreds of bright wind.
In this school poetry circle, writing madly
students are quiet finally, giggling stopped,
interest piqued, Jack and Liam split up.
Just the heating is going crazy,
interior fan beating the air about
behind a boxed-wall with gilded lattice
like an old Ottoman harem grill.
It had intruded on speech,
my throat scratchy for water.
A boom-like explosion – suddenly – Crack Crack!
Paul’s head jerks up toward the library door.
I tread carefully towards it, beginning to shake.
BANG – BANG POP POP-POP
My bare neck feels the brush of its speed.
So, it has come. The moment is here,
to be riddled, shot apart, left for a news-bite,
quickly covered by newsprint waiting
for ambulance, police, terror squad.
And because they are here with me,
teenagers I’ve come to know intensely,
fiercely I force myself calm, breath held, jaw tight,
shoulders braced like a primed maternal shield.
Knees slightly bent, shoulder cocked to bar
any entrance, I wait for the next shot. I wait.
The handle is steel-cold in my palm gripping it wet.
Ready at the glass window in the door,
I peer towards clarity, feeling suddenly
Ridiculous.
It’s only a girl in the corridor, long uniform hanging,
exasperated, fed up, slapping down heavy folders
onto the shiny flat concrete floor outside, one by one.
For a moment I’m lost, confused, caught into cross-fired
realities, tense in a world now full of dark surprises –
but no – yes – this is a small safe Irish town, isn’t it?
© Robyn Rowland
Robyn Rowland has 15 books, 12 of poetry, including Under This Saffron Sun – Safran Güneşin Altında, Turkish translations, Mehmet Ali Çelikel, (Ireland, 2019). Her recent book Steep Curve is out with 5Islands Press, 2024. These poems encompass her two years caring for her father, who died at 102, and her decision to leave Ireland to do so. Her poetry appears in many national/international journals, over forty anthologies, and eight editions of Best Australian Poems. Her readings for National Irish Poetry Reading Archive, James Joyce Library, UCD, available on YouTube.
e.g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLhUEbb6Q54
website: https://robynrowland.com/
Oh, these are superb!
Robyn,
Love the sensory imagery and deep feeling in your poems.
Kaaren