Carran

I could not say I felt like a walking miracle as we travelled south on the first day of spring. Snow on the Burren fleshed out skeletal stones, stopped gaps in the walls so the air could not pass and the valley sank deeper into smothered soundlessness. [...]

by Lorna Shaughnessy

I could not say
I felt like a walking miracle
as we travelled south
on the first day of spring.

Snow on the Burren
fleshed out skeletal stones,
stopped gaps in the walls
so the air could not pass
and the valley sank deeper
into smothered soundlessness.

Three swans heaved across the lake
in burdensome flight,
the huff and cronk of the long pull
echoless on the blanketed stone.

I went to the well
in search of no more miracles
than those already worked:
the vanishing act conjured
by the surgeon’s hand,
the venomous magic
that coils around the cup.

I went to leave flowers,
draw water and listen to its song,
gather round the fire
to hear words recited,
familiar lines sung
and recall absent voices.

To be thankful
at the end of a long year
of days when I hated
having to be grateful.

On that two-faced morning
I could look back
at my bloodied footprints
and see them fill with snow,
then turn to face the blank page.

01.02.2008

Lorna Shaughnessy

Lorna Shaughnessy has published four poetry collections, Torching the Brown River, Witness Trees, Anchored, and Lark Water (Salmon Poetry) as well as a pamphlet, Song of the Forgotten Shulamite (Lapwing). In 2018 she was awarded an Artist’s Bursary by the Arts Council of Ireland and in 2021 an Agility Award to fund the making of short poetry films.

Her monologues on the story of Iphigenia were staged in Cúirt International Literature Festival in 2017, in the Heaney HomePlace in 2018. This was subsequently adapted for video in 2021 and screened in the Winter Warmers Festival Nov 2021.

She lectures in Hispanic Studies in NUI Galway and translates Galician, Spanish and Latin American poetry. With Keith Payne and Martín Veiga, she co-edited the anthology of Irish and Galician ecopoetry, A Different Eden (Dedalus Press 2021).