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Best of Irish Poetry 2010
Editor: Matthew Sweeney

Songs of Earth and Light
Barbara Korun poems translated by Theo Dorgan

Done Dating DJs
by Jennifer Minniti-Shippey
Winner, 2008 Fool for Poetry Competition

Richesses: Francophone Songwriter Poets
Edited and translated by Aidan Hayes

Munster Literature Centre

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PEGGIE GALLAGHER

Peggie Gallagher lives in Sligo. Her work has been published in Force 10, THE SHOp, Cyphers, Southword, Atlanta Review, Envoi, Peregrine, West 47, Poetry Daily and Poetry Ireland.

Ode to the Telephone Pole

Loveliest of trees you’re not,
old spindle-spine, catching first light,
mottled with moss and birdlime
above the shrill of forsythia.
Tethered to duty. Strangely reassuring.
Casting your lines on the horizon,
catching sound as a sail catches wind,
your junction box strapped like a mandolin,
relics of plastic caught in your wings.

How alike we’ve become,
with little to recommend us but tenacity,
billeted here at fate’s whimsy
sharing the same patch.

A figure at the window
tracing the changing seasons,
sun bowling shadows across the grass,
sky turning from peach to ecru to blue,
six goldfinches at the birdfeeder.

What a pair of grubbers we’ve become,
sloughing off our nocturnal smells,
the in and the out of breath,
the vast and chaotic nerve-ends,
the tug and pull of our lives,
heart the size of two clenched fists,
the needle constantly atremble
telling the world’s story.

Old dream-catcher,
gauging every sigh, every rustle,
the high sharp cries in the night,
the cantos, chansons and lullabies,
the christenings, nuptials and requiems.
Crouching on the knife-edge
spider swaddling her catch.
The way happiness can hang by a thread.

©2009 Peggie Gallagher

Author Links

Three poems by Gallagher on the Cavan Poetry Page

Poem by Gallagher in The Cathach

'In Her Later Years': poem shortlisted for the 2011 Gregory O'Donoghue Prize

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