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GO TO MLC HOMEPAGE
ONLINE BOOKSTORE FEATURED TITLES
Songs of Earth and Light
Richesses: Francophone Songwriter Poets
Munster Literature Centre
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Niamh Boyce is from Athy, Co Kildare. She writes short stories and poetry. One of the winners of the annual Éist Poetry Competition 2008, her work has been published in Crannog and the Sunday Tribune’s New Irish Writing Page. She was short-listed for the Molly Keane Creative Writing Award ’09 and is a nominee for the Hennessy Award ’09.
Sleep Talking
Blue-black fur skims every part of me that moves, and I move quickly, from mother bed to a maze of paths, glazed with scattered crumbs of glass. A creature whose voice I can’t hear, whose face
I can’t see, is teaching me to read with my feet. This is a time, not to think. Travelling deep is tough. It’s always winter. No. Love isn’t enough in the tinker palace of memory. Bird women squawk
overhead, a carnival of forgotten babble. Baubles swing from their claws, clear spheres pregnant with sea, moon and sky. They swoop. Their eyes are yellow with history. Look back!
Who knew there were so many of us? I see beasts, unfettered freaks. Feathered, furred and taking corners until undergrowth gives way to cliff face. Blinding sapphire waves break us, plunge us,
one by one into an amniotic ice blue sea, where we settle to an alert rest. If you look now, I’m still. Except for a fishy under-lid flicker. Sleeping. Not
bottom of the ocean, breathing water. Permeable. Suckling the rushes of some early second. When a secret runs past my unborn fingertips. I listen.
©2009 Niamh Boyce
Author Links 'A Wild Cat's Buffet', Boyce poem in Crannog Article about Boyce winning Éist competition (p. 2) Article about Boyce's environmental artwork with Greencrafts/Electric Picnic
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©2009 Southword Editions and Munster Literature Centre |
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