A taste of: ‘The Stony Thursday Book’, A collection of Contemporary Irish Poetry

http://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/groundhog-week/

Groundhog Week   If you could relive the past week, would you?                                               Would you change anything?

(Thank you kah1982, for suggesting this prompt) Ben Huberman

 

The answer to each question is ‘NO’. Planning the next week is quite sufficient. Procrastination is the thing I most want to avoid. It is so easy to get caught up in books and not write myself.

Recently an Irish friend, Catriona O’Connor, sent me a book of poems. I’d like to share two of those poems with you. We met in our youth, when we were living in Urbino, Italy in 1970. Catriona is an artist who not only painted but also organized an exhibition of her work in Urbino that year. I admired her tenacity then, as I do now.

Catriona illustrated the cover of ‘The Stony Thursday Book, A Collection of Contemporary Poetry’. I was delighted to receive it. ‘The Stony Thursday Book’, published by The Arts Office of Limerick City and County Council, (Autumn 2014).

Ice-Cold Christmas

Granny, in her fireside chair

sips form her delicate glass,

Granddad attempts to free

his nicotined airways,

interrupting the chorus

of Oh Holy Night, on the radio.

You sit, white-knuckled,

on the sofa’s edge.

Snugly sheltered in your womb,

I feel your broken heartbeats.

Together we absorb

the icy silence of rejection.

Eileen F. Connolly

 

As it is winter here, I’d like to share the following:

Winter Sun

 When grey days split and rain slaps against the glass

will I remember the Isla, where under a brochure-blue

sky, our bodies packed in last year’s togs, we dismiss

the press of new flesh, ease sagging bellies,

marbled thighs, onto canvas loungers, guiltlessly.

 

Thirsty as stranded crabs we gulp down the sun

in long draughts while the sea vacillates

between turquoise and magenta, the waves

trundle out, and the tide’s scalloped petticoat

sweeps the shoreline like an old queen’s ball- gown.

Marian O’Rourke

http://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/groundhog-week/