Dromineer Literary Festival Competition Poems 2011
POETRY Competition was judged by Dermot Healy
1st Yoga Class by Liza Costello from Dublin
Yoga class
Nine people stand before one
whose clothes are the colour
of a child’s crayon sun.
Outside, a cyclist skis by,
through collapsing rain.
Hands flash naked and white.
It’s week eight. We are old hands by now.
Without words, we salute the long set sun,
turn ourselves into cobras, bridges, ploughs.
Outside, street lamps ping awake.
One by one they make the yellow
circulatory system of the dark.
He just watches, walks around,
presses his hand against someone’s back,
moves a foot two inches farther out.
‘Come into shivasana,’ he says. Corpse pose.
Where blood buzzes fast and warm.
Machine gun rain against ceiling windows.
Afterwards, shoe-lacing chat.
Will the weather break for the weekend?
The pain of Thursday evening traffic.
The man on the television later that night
lies face down on the pavement.
Above his head, a badly drawn heart.
2nd Meeting Himself Coming Back by James Martyn from Galway
Meeting Himself Coming Back
Coming back, having failed to buy books
in a strange part of a stranger town,
Furey turned a corner and met himself.
He recognised himself immediately,
easing by on the narrow footpath, music
from a pub making his alter-ego look away.
But it was himself: the same slow gait,
eyes cast down but not humble,
the wicked click in his left knee,
that unmistakable froth of wispy hair.
Of course the clothes were different,
he never would have worn such a suit:
a broad pinstripe and the tie smacked
of some club, a repeated golf-ball motif
with a Latin text above a waving flag.
He thought the overcoat unnecessary,
never having owned one himself, but
they would have agreed on the shoes,
and the briefcase would have fitted-in
anywhere Furey would have gone
if he could have afforded it.
When their knuckles touched
on the narrow path,
he heard his other-self exhale,
a spasm almost in the quick release,
a groan of something lost or worn down,
and when he turned, his shadow
seemed to shimmer for a moment
under a burden they both could feel,
Furey’s lifting as his footsteps lightened
and he turned away.
3rd The Grip of the Dead by Paul McMahon from Sligo
The Grip of the Dead
A man's hand washed up on Strandhill beach, I heard
through the grapevine. An hour later I was suddenly walking along
the shoreline where the tide brought it in, trying to understand why
I felt like the sky had broken and the sun had become a trumpet
of darkness and I longed to run into the waves.
The hand had resisted the liquid, dreaming void of the sea,
clutching the tide-rocked peddles; the lullaby
of the tide’s to-and-fro couldn’t macerate
those driftwood-fingers into the sleepless vacuum
of the deep’s sombre hunger. The playful laughter
of the tidal-lines is a tumbling moon-netted mockery
to our invention of the Gods. Born on land with lungs,
a full-grown man struggling in aquatic depths,
a Darwinian impulse for gills kicking into his genes,
an amphibian’s antonym summated to a severed
fingered dorsal, stranded just beyond the tide’s reach.
The shoals of mackerel run on, their blue
Atlantic conspiratorial markings a moving window
of blinding Venetian scomber, a fool’s gold gleam
of the shooting star he declined to wish upon;
their fluttering tiger marks – the wings of the bird
he once caught indoors and set free without pleading
for the return of the one that got away.
Suddenly I realize why I'm here – guilt hauntingly
comes into being, like a shoal of one's own tormented fish,
within the bottomless ocean of the mind: I pried open
the shuttered chain-gang slats of the mackerel shoal
to see the drowning man’s vaulted story but they turned
inside me and vanished into my own vast emptiness, leaving
one sinking hand reaching out from the hollow dark,
a flare of lost memory grasping to be remembered,
a mute yearning sensed too late to clutch,
an infant-call still gilled in its mother’s core,
the tiny unknown hand I had naively let go of
in the endless ocean of the womb.
Comments