Today’s choice
Previous poems
Patrick Deeley
The Inspiring
As you rummage of a morning
among dust-furred personal effects
jumbled in an old
wooden suitcase under a bed
and seeming to belong to no-one,
you find a woman
about whom the world, if it ever
supposed at all, supposed
only that she quietly got by,
has remained hidden for decades
in the shape of a book
of hand-written ballads, or in
a crackly recording
of fiddle music or song. But what
grips is the shiver
when you realise that the stranger –
fervent, fierce,
pent-up for so long – is released,
lisping or lilting there
until the open, awoken heart
is yours and yours alone.
With a sigh you go
back to the chores of household
and haggard – but now
you can never wholly go. You have
become altered, stirred
to loose, it will take
a lifetime, the cry of self-discovery.
Patrick Deeley is a poet, memoirist and children’s writer from Loughrea. Keepsake, his eighth collection with Dedalus Press, appeared in 2024.
www.patrickdeeley.com
Irene Cunningham
Lavender seeps. I expect my limbs to leaden, lead the body down through sheet, mattress-cover, into the machinery of sleep where other lives exist.
Graham Clifford
The Still Face Experiment
You must have seen that Youtube clip
where a mother lets her face go dead.
Her toddler carries on burbling for twenty to thirty seconds until she realises there is nothing coming back to her.
Susan Jane Sims
After you died,
someone asked:
What was it like
in those final sixteen days
waiting for your son to die?
Jane Frank
I imagine returning to the house.
Furniture is piled up in the rain—
the ideas that won’t fit.
Ilias Tsagas
I used to dial your number to hear your voice. I would hold the receiver for a long time as if your voice was trapped inside . . .
Jim Paterson
Shove it, that farewell
and the sky shimmering with frost
and the waves wrecking on the shore
Philip Rush
Tom’s advice, mind you,
was to drink hot chocolate
last thing at night
on a garden bench
beneath the moon.
Rosie Jackson
Today, I talked with a friend about death
and what it means to have arrived in my life
before I have to leave it . . .
Mariam Saidan
they said sing in private,
Zan shouldn’t sing.