by Lorna Shaughnessy
Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. – Susan Sontag
The Dual Citizen
[...] who you were before you first walked through these doors who you became and who you ceased to be in that year of onerous citizenship.
Warm assault of forgotten smells.
An antiseptic tingle in the nose,
the vaguely chemical residue of bleach
ignites memory faster than speech –
who you were
before you first walked through these doors
who you became and
who you ceased to be
in that year of onerous citizenship.
You find you feel at home
knowing enough of the lingo
to get by and not look a fool,
knowing how to play that part –
how to be the good patient,
take your medicine,
observe routine.
For the next thirty-six hours
you step back into that other self,
become again one among the sick,
recall how it feels to be lucky
or blessed.
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).
