In Memory of Anne

It hasn’t been this bright all year –
the moon’s white scalp, spot-lit,

a head turned away from a thing
the rest of us fear: unearthly dark

and its stars – the small unfindable
glass in a vast unwalkable carpet.

Night is where more things hide
than dare to appear. Except behind

closed eyes, here new worlds realise;
less-ordered, sculpted from twisted

timelines, reared as if out of a sleeping sea;
waves to keep the sleeper from wakeful thought.

So when the priest said she died
at home in her sleep, I replied Too vague

demanding to know during which
dream she was caught. Was she mid-chase –

half-dressed in a colour she’d never wear?
Already talking to the dead?

Or something more of our world, perhaps –
like changing the bed, reversing the car,

washing the step some Summer afternoon,
peeling a label from a beetroot jar –

her cupboards were still full; spices, pins,
seeds for pots. All those flowers.

Eugene O’Hare recently won runner-up for the 52nd Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award and was shortlisted for the poetry prize at Belfast Book Festival. His poems appear, or forthcoming, in The Frogmore Papers, Stand, Poetry Ireland Review, Acumen and others.