Live Encounters Poetry & Writing April 2025
Carrowkeel, poem by Sinéad McClure.
CARROWKEEL
—————-
The Neolithic Woman
She draws spirals; a whooper ascent
rippling the flat back of Lough Availe,
the eyes of a wildcat caught moonlit.
She scratches the angular,
mountain peaks gouged in mud
like a bold child with a crayon.
Meanders; undulating lines of a world,
glimpsed, kept and coveted.
She draws flint-imprints of a sun
stared into for hours until blind.
And after that she traces the stars.
****
The Archaeologists
Praeger calls Lough Availe a quiet sheet of water,
says it is neither vast nor terrible.
No-one saw the ice crack when sun lit hills
and red spines flexed as if they might erupt.
Sallies creak in summer like a door opening out
after some incantation. Below the swell of burial tombs
the men gather with their tiny hammers.
Tremors reverberate into fox runs
until they break through funerary walls,
find bones; remark on a brutal ending,
box them all for one hundred years.
****
The Bones
A woman lost herself
to hazel, and to oak,
to bears hugging ash trunks
awkward for honey,
to arctic foxes,
scavenge-eyed.
To where, slumped behind the dark, giant wall of an elk,
she wished only that she could draw his shape.
© Sinéad McClure
Sinéad McClure has published two chapbooks, her poetry can be found in anthologies, magazines and online. Including The Stinging Fly, South Word, Live Encounters and Ink Sweat & Tears. In 2024 she was highly commended in the Patrick Kavanagh Award, and graduated with an MA in Creative Practice from ATU Sligo with a special award for innovation for her Epic Poem “Nádúr”.
www.sineadmcclure.com
I love Sinead’s work and these three poems are a further expression of her closeness to nature…and in particular to every hedge, hump and dip in her locality.