Today’s choice
Previous poems
Cormac Culkeen
A Gift
Morning’s cusp
of summer
in a cobalt breach
the sun is a
white coin
lifted
from the sea.
Walking,
going
somewhere
from
old rifts, like
a calliope, spun
like fists
on a
hurricane
stare, glassy
arraignment
loops
a centred
pain.
(This happens to us all.
Anywhere, each day, our
world rearranges itself, moves
its pieces;
now the empty sky
drums down tension, a slack
face, out of step with living things.)
But:
at
a shop
counter,
a simple gift of
everyday, to talk,
see and be taken
from set accounts,
a smile with warm
eyes, exchange of
life, snatches of
time, some laughter,
experience unfolds
to a clarity
of another, their
place outside whereas –
(My brother says that ideas move
from person to person. They are
things of purpose. If they are not
acted upon, they travel and perch
in the still air where they are left,
waiting, for a new mind
presenting a new home for
them. I believe this to be true; we
can make peace with a world that
allows for a possibility like this.)
– outside, I lean to
a wall,
feel its heat.
Haze seeps from
concrete, light, rippling.
I take it in.
Something
is given back to me.
Cormac Culkeen lives in Galway and completed an MA in Writing in 2023. He has been published in Causeway, Apricot Press, Bindweed, Ink, Sweat and Tears, and Honest Ulsterman. He is a founding editor of Ragaire magazine, dedicated to publishing international writers and writers based in the West of Ireland.
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