Going Back Home Again When are you going back?”Often I reply-I have an open ticket. Cups of tea full of sugar and milkThe full Irish or Ulster frySomber heart felt chatby stony graveyard walls.Old paths – now jungle under growthsYou wonder where time went.No one here knows you anymore.A couple of older neighborsstill tell how … Continue reading
Tagged with Poetry …
Bilingual Haiku
Crainn Jacaranda,/buamaí gorma áille…
Jacaranda trees,lovely explosions of blue. Continue reading
The Earls Didn’t Return
There’s a border in Ireland now
that began – some would say –
when O’Neill and O’Donnell
of Tyrone and Tyrconnell,
took flight from where the
blue horizon is swallowed up
by the feral Atlantic in Donega Continue reading
Reflections from Eda Payne
There was a time when thoughts
were clear and led to productive
musings. Continue reading
Seasonal Poems
Vermeer would have made much of it Continue reading
Thomas Kinsella (1928-2021)
Many of his poems are celebrated and loved for their profound personal candour and sensitivity, but he has also been a poet of searing political and public critical insight. Continue reading
A Poem from Diane Fahey
Yet fifty years later
Seán Ó Conaill could tell, word for word,
a story he’d heard, as a boy,
read from a journal. Continue reading
Why Do You Write in Irish?
The world seemed clear. The questions started later in life or when we went to the cities and were asked to convert and change our language to English, sometimes politely sometimes not so much. We got used to the requests, ‘can you please say that in English?’ or the statements ‘We speak English in here’ or ‘I’m afraid we don’t speak that language here’. Continue reading
Poems by David Harris
Today, on our morning swim together.
I watch her dive, hair streaming,
at home among the waves…
You won’t find these in the bush.
Thistles, nettles, tumbleweed,
three-cornered jacks, horehound, Continue reading
Ode to the Women of Ireland
The winner of the Percy French Prize for Witty Verse. Continue reading