Winners in the Dromineer 2014 Poetry Competition judged by Matthew Sweeney
1st A
Blackfriary Burial by Michael Farry, Meath.
2nd Borderlands by Roisin
Kelly, Cork
3rd
Dream Notes by Pearse Murray, Albany, NY, USA,
HC The Chase by Simon Lewis, Carlow
A Blackfriary Burial
Infants take much longer, their bones fragile,
faint, more difficult to dig. I
spent two
days with make-up brush and
trowel, while
my workmate recorded progress,
drew
each bone of the emerging
skeleton.
When I had finished, every scrap
on view,
I joined the other diggers, who
one by one
had left their cuts to stand
above it, stare
in admiration or remembrance.
Some
judged age, agreed on two. I
didn’t care
by then, worn out, spent that
restless night
brushing soil from friendly skulls,
staring
at their smiles. Next morning,
back at the site
I analysed my finds tray, shocked
to count
so many shroud pins, tarnished
and slight,
ten from my burial. We searched
and found
the books suggested that the norm
was four
and our past experience on this
ground
confirmed that. It was worrying.
Although
I had been methodical, I may have
missed
an infant, failed to notice the
ghostly
trace of decay. But it was time
to lift,
bag bones for later lab work. On
my knees
that evening, packing the final
flimsy
pieces in their labelled bags, I
realized
the care desolate parents took to
wrap
their transient gift, how well
they sealed
its shroud with abundant pins, to
equip
the body for its long and silent
wait
until we reverently raised it up.
Borderlands
The soldiers who searched our car smiled at a pink fairy
at the side of the road.
But fifteen minutes earlier, as we’d approached the border
my mother had braked, and yelled at the boys
messing with a toy gun in the backseat
do ye want to get shot at?
I’d smoothed the folds of my glittering dress
tapped my wand against the window, beyond which
cement factories lurched against afternoon light.
Those towers coughed the breath of dragons.
At their feet the old man sat
outside his thatched cottage, smoking his pipe in the garden
winked as we passed, knowing me
for a creature like himself
who could move between two realms.
He was the gatesman in disguise, and signalled that the soldiers
could let my family through from the northern meadows
to the marshier south, where I’d hide from the bog-witch
with her once-beautiful red lips
muttering spells of her own to remind everyone
how young she used to be.
The land where the old man lived
was no land at all: it was grey, with grey factories
and grey outposts
but the cottage door was bright, bright blue.
Later, the outposts were dismantled, the cottage
abandoned, while the factories remained
just to keep an eye on things.
Now I have no need for disguise
but when I cross the border, I always look
towards the empty cottage: paint flaking from its window panes
with lorry-shudder on the lanes, and every year
a bit more thatch has fallen in.
Dream Notes
I take some guitar notes out for
a walk in the woods
and introduce them to the notes
sung by birds and
breezing leaves whose timbre
makes for sweet magic.
They want to float further into
the deep green
and we go along to a babbling
brook
where we dance giddy on the
spangling splash of stones.
Excited, they cajole me into
going afar.
Now we wade into a wide river
stretch
and under a slivered swaying
willow-caress.
We float towards the estuarine
marsh
where we sing with the Blue
Heron’s primitive squawk
and glide off its soft wing-beat.
Then into the roaring deep
blae-blue:
I get lost from undertows of
tone-shifts
and whales wailing sky-high their
water notes.
I fend off punching waves of
surfs
and somehow return to the timbral
woods
where there they are: scoring
notes with the birds.
A shaft of sun-wash, butterflies
cruise at the wood’s edge,
a field of bluebell blue tremble
silent perforations
and the notes all waft away to
the south or perhaps Heaven—
with the wind threshing gold
leaves and leaving me
awake and longing to capture that
music again
so as to face the coming days of winter-cold
hell.
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