Live Encounters Poetry & Writing 16th Anniversary Volume One
November- December 2025
On a September afternoon, poems by Anne Walsh Donnelly.
On a September afternoon
yellow-tits flit
from branch to bird house
in a garden.
Three writers sit in a kitchen,
appetites teased by scents
of garlic frying in a pan
and cinnamon crumble caressing
foraged blackberries in the oven.
These world-weary women
feast on falafel, olives
and stuffed vine leaves.
They share stories of children
as mad as meerkats,
clients as tight
as a duck’s arse
and woodpecker landladies
who just won’t stop tapping.
After, there’s laughter
as they utter rude words
(in the nicest possible way).
Grace flows through
their in-breaths, their out-breaths,
love resides
in the space between them.
After The Storm
I sit, sipping a chai latte in Connemara National Park,
beside a trio of Sitka spruce. Cream-green lichen
acnes their wrinkled bark, their moss-covered fingers
sink into soft earth. Scattered on the ground
their cigar-shaped cones. Fierce winds have taken
limbs but not the bird houses strapped to their trunks.
Sparrow hawks, chaffinches and wrens still sing
oblivious to the relentless rush of the nearby stream.
© Anne Walsh Donnelly
Anne Walsh Donnelly writes prose, poetry and plays and is the author of the novel He Used To Be Me, (New Island Books, 2024.) Her poetry collections include Odd as F*ck, (Fly on the Wall Poetry Press, 2021) and The Woman With An Owl Tattoo (Fly on the Wall Poetry Press, 2019). She was appointed Poet Laureate of Belmullet by Poetry Ireland and the Mayo Arts Office in 2021.