by Macdara Woods

1.
Which translated
text   You asked
First took me
heart and soul
into another world

And my answer always
that same Satyricon
I read in French
in August heat
in Paris and in love

In nineteen sixty–one
another country
and besides . . .
I was transported
transubstantiate

Cared not a naked rap
for Port–Royal’s report
that pagan love
and life can only end
in loneliness

Celibate horror
at the phallus in the garden:
I’d rather have
Ruth Brown or
Lucille Bogan any day

Who knew what they
were at and why
and what was what:
If I can’t sell it
I’ll     sit on it

Inalienable Ruth who made
them laugh
in the barrel–house
small hours
with the doors closed

We most fiercely
want that
which we cannot have —
is our insurance
in a big bad world

by Paula Meehan

The Flood

It was only when it receded
we knew it for the gift it had been.
If truth be told we missed the water.
It was exactly what we’d needed.
We missed the way it made a mirror —
doubled goose, godwit, egret, heron;
and that once in moonlight we looked down
on two complete and drowning strangers,
those depths where later wolfbane seeded.

The Trust

Leave her in the lap of Our Lady —
her counsel for where to place the lost
when we close the door on their madness.
She slammed the door on her own daughter,
left her to the city’s chartered streets,
found her in the Liffey’s dark water,
cast up in the week before Christmas
the city gripped in the hardest frost
the eve of the new austerity.

The Conjuration

I walked your ghost trail through the city,
I knocked at all the old addresses,
but nowhere did I find word of you.
One friend said you’d died. It was a lie:
I knew by the shadows in her eyes.
She swore you’d been some class of a spy.
I was but one in a lengthening queue
of women crazed by your excesses,
fucking fools who deserved no pity.

The Grimoire

When you call it my book of shadows
I scry the tawny deer move upwind
towards the Furry Glen, and the stars
above have their own kind of grammar,
their own declension of wingéd folk —
the Mother, the Father, the Other.
I understand the transit of Mars
is a fated course that has us twinned
lost souls beneath the skylight window.

The Melter

I remember you well in Grogan’s.
You called it the Poet’s Horror Hole.
And though it was easy to get there,
it was harder to find a way home.
Now that you’re on the straight and narrow
with your charts, your mottoes, your slogans,
your strategies, your game plans, your goals
you’re melting our heads with disasters,
with gossip, with lost–bar–god syndrome.

by Afric McGlinchey

Splintery armfuls
of the most brazen, persistent kind
send one scurrying.

massive hands moving clockwise
across four corners.
A wheel is plundered.

A horse snorts yes.
One groans.
This is memory.

Or dream.
The jets of steam,
pausing.

Scavengers carting away
redundant people.
Here and gone.

There and now.
Waves bury themselves at our feet,
swallowing hard.

The chill hurries into grey.
There’s nothing casual
about turning away.

by Ciaran O’Driscoll

All right, this is what’s happening.
Andrew Motion will recite a poem,
then I’ll recite one. And then you can go home.

Andrew Motion will recite
a poem about chickens in the sunset.
It’s not really about chickens in the sunset,
but at least he won’t get twenty years in jail
for writing one thing and meaning something else
as has been known to happen to poets who live
under certain tyrannical regimes.

And I’ll recite a poem about seagulls
but it, too, will be about something else
like the time when as a callow adolescent
I took a ballet student to the cinema
and when those gulls came into view
scudding the waves and rising into the gale,
the soundtrack’s orchestra rising with them,
I loudly whispered ‘Symbols of Freedom!’
to my wafer–thin companion.

Chickens in the sunset, seagulls in a gale,
these chickens and seagulls
that mean something else
could earn a poet twenty years in prison
but thankfully not here,
thankfully not yet.