‘These Late June Evenings’, ‘Nyctinasty’, ‘Drift’, ‘February 19’, & ‘Am I The Only One’.

Photographer - Christine Trujillo

These Late June Evenings

This coastal mirage slips its moorings
in the silver late evening light, the diamonds
on the sea dulling as gently as controlled light-emitting
diodes in a newly formed seaside room.
Driving around, parking, watching, I look at the
houses sketched into the hillside, hidden in
overhangs of western Irish rock and root, holding
their contents with gloved hands, curving around
familial ritual. Thriving, occasionally flailing.
How long do we have I wonder aimlessly, noting the
houses emptied out of generations, supplanted naturally
by the next and the next. I strangle a breath and there, just there,
above the white line of the shore, below the hushed bog cotton,
in front of the limpid sun slipping way down, beneath the gulls
screeching retreat,
I see my absence.

Nyctinasty

Yesterday the dawn chorus seemed heightened,
taut, strung out on its own anxiety. Quivered and
strewn it catapulted me from my bed pulsing with
an unknown fear, a shadow partner moving swiftly
alongside me.
Outside in the half light, waiting for my four-month
puppy to show some affinity for toileting, I studied
the ocean to try and fathom the invasion of a near country.
How the people are being corralled, displaced, murdered
at will, how evil achieves a mundaneness, how shock
turns to fusion, becoming part of our DNA.
When I cannot look up or out for fear of blinding guilt, I
look to the ground and am stilled by an armada of daisies
hunched into their own being, closed to all interrogation.
How had I forgotten that daisies close at night.

Drift

When it dawned on me, after all, that life is finite
I shed my carcass body, my soul armour, and went
down to the shore to purify soul in brackish cutting water,
to see where soul would go.
Resting back from awareness further into the shadows
I watch soul break free of me, frolic and swoop in the surf,
Defying and goading the deadly backwash, preening in the glint of the
salt on the sea and screeching along with the careening seagulls.
While soul revelled, I wept. For every time I did not disrupt more, go to
the edge of every bluff and soar. Wept to see what soul was and
how I had not seen the chaotic beauty within. Jackal shrieks came from all
around me, a chorus of fury and lament so deep the sky blackened and roiled,
turning in on itself.
Petrified I ran, calling to soul to come back and unite with me, to write a
chapter that spat courage and would turn the world upside down. Soul was
basking now, moving further away, out to sea in a clamour of foam and hubris
forgetting in its anarchic swing – the fantastical.

February 19

In grief and sinister joy I leaned
Out the window over the river Corrib
Searching for lack of malice as I had become
Used to.
Jealousy & hate darts thrown for so long, sick
Twisted plaits – your ladder to the stars.
Down from the docks, five swans purled their
Haughty way towards the Claddagh.
So blue-white in the dark. Why five? Why not.
Nothing about them begged me, but oh, how
I needed them on that night.

Am I The Only One

who upon waking September mornings inhales the
smell of yesterday fading faster than a meteor or climbs
the air stairs to find a fretty cloud to rest on whilst plotting
the flawless coup
The only one to grieve the imminent departure of burnt
orange Montbretia who nodded and danced for me daily
and asked for nothing in return save admiration which
I gave & gave
The only one to add a suspicion of autumn to my morning coffee
and drink from the poisoned chalice anyway
self-administered not imposed
The only one to know there is a September day that stops the straggly
rivers running through my head and for that one day of your birth
I celebrate wildly.

Marian Kilcoyne is an Irish writer. She has been widely published in Ireland, UK, USA and Europe. She has read her work on National Radio, RTE Lyric FM. Her poetry collection, The Heart Uncut, was published in 2020 by Wordsonthestreet publishers Galway. She lives in Belfast and Co. Mayo. Website www.mariankilcoyne.com