{"id":1357,"date":"2008-08-31T15:34:00","date_gmt":"2008-08-31T15:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=1357"},"modified":"2008-08-31T15:34:00","modified_gmt":"2008-08-31T15:34:00","slug":"two-poems-by-nuala-ni-chonchuir","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/two-poems-by-nuala-ni-chonchuir\/","title":{"rendered":"Two poems by Nuala Ni Chonchuir"},"content":{"rendered":"

Straw Widow<\/span>

 <\/span>
Monday is putting in time,<\/span>
Tuesday, the longest day,<\/span>
Wednesday, a frisson \u2013<\/span>
a swell between my legs<\/span>
while I track your journey<\/span>
from industrial estate,<\/span>
to train, to bigger train;<\/span>
the final stretch is your walk<\/span>
from the station to home,<\/span>
and me: your straw widow.<\/span>


~ ~ ~ ~ ~ <\/span>


This Is No Cana<\/span>
after Stanley Spencer's painting<\/span>


The wedding breakfast is eaten<\/span>
and our guests are idling,<\/span>
there's no handy miracle man<\/span>
to turn good water to better wine.<\/span>

My bride is regretful about<\/span>
the poverty of our feast.<\/span>

'What can we do?' I say to her,<\/span>
my mind on our honeymoon:<\/span>
the raw velvet of her opening,<\/span>
the soft suck of skin over skin.<\/span>

'Let them eat cake,' she says,<\/span>
and I'm glad that I've married her.<\/span>



* Nuala N\u00ed Chonch\u00fair lives in Galway, Ireland. Her bilingual poetry collection <\/span>Tattoo:Tat\u00fa<\/span> (Arlen House, 2007) was shortlisted for the 2008 Strong Award. Nuala adds: “Twenty of the poems in English also have Irish versions\/translations. In Ireland we call our other language 'Irish'. In Irish it is called 'Gaeilge' (pronounced 'gwayl-ga'). For clarity, and usually only to non-Irish people, we call it Irish-Gaelic. The Gaeltacht is where native Irish speakers live.”<\/span>
<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Straw Widow Monday is putting in time,Tuesday, the longest day,Wednesday, a frisson \u2013a swell between my legswhile I track your journeyfrom industrial estate,to train, to bigger train;the final stretch is your walkfrom the station to home,and me: your straw widow.~ ~ ~ ~ ~ This Is No Canaafter Stanley Spencer's paintingThe wedding breakfast is eatenand our […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1357\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}