
GO TO MLC HOMEPAGE

FOOL FOR POETRY
INTERNATIONAL CHAPBOOK
COMPETITION 2018

Submit to Southword
ONLINE BOOKSTORE FEATURED TITLES

New Irish Voices
Poetry chapbooks by
Roisin Kelly & Paul McMahon

Liberty Walks Naked
by Maram al-Masri, trans. Theo Dorgan

Chapbooks by Fool for Poetry
Competition Winners 2018
Not in Heaven by Molly Minturn
Bog Arabic by Bernadette McCarthy

Richesses: Francophone Songwriter Poets
Edited and translated by Aidan Hayes
Munster Literature Centre

Create your badge




|
MARIE NAUGHTON

Marie Naughton's poems have appeared in publications including Mslexia, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Dark Horse, Crannog and Lines Underwater. Others have been placed in competitions and she won the Cafe Writers competition in 2012. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the Centre for New Writing at Manchester University. She is a psychotherapist and a counsellor in a high school. She lives in Manchester.
Elegy
Before the phone rang again
I sloped off to a farm near Frodsham
and bought three hens:
Sussex, Wyandotte, Cuckoo Maran
and another, a Cochin, another,
Rhode Island Red, always another
like tales of your childhood
–– tell us, tell us
we pestered to hear them over and over.
The nanny goat, locked in the outhouse
on Sundays, the family at Mass. That Easter
you found her, wedged in the toilet. Or Rover
the growler, a neighbour laid poison
because of his barking. Or best of all
–– tell us, tell us
your dad’s cap, snug with eggs
cradled home from the allotment
to hatch by the fire.
No one warns they’ll wreck a garden.
I’d have laughed, not believed
how they dig and turn beds
into earth mounds
and craters. Up to my eyes in redmite
and lice, the reek at the door,
I repeated what people kept saying
–– nothing compares. And the taste,
those fresh, delicious, golden yolks.
©2015 Marie Naughton
Author Links
'When Elvis Died': poem by Marie Naughton in The Dark Horse
'Before Her Diagnosis': poem by Marie Naughton at And Other Poems
|