The day you were born

we drove along the harbour road
where snow fell as softly as a million feathers
moulted by a god-bird.
I hadn’t slept in two days; labour was slow
and I was high on the hormones of birth.

The sleeping city looked small and new,
swaddled in still ripples of white.
Our headlights illuminated each flake
as if the sky had shed a path
of frozen stars for us to follow.

I wish I could be back in that moment
gliding through a niveous haze,
intoxicated with the promise of you;
about to see your face for the first time,
bring you to my inexperienced breast.

I don’t remember much else until you
were naked and wet on my chest,
your skin streaked white with vernix
like feathers oiled from the egg,
and I couldn’t stop crying and laughing,

laughing and
crying.

‘The day you were born’ was first published in Skylight 47 (#17) in 2023.

** 

 Ingredients (for a mother)

On a tear soaked floor, under rage splattered walls,
I set her down in a thousand square-foot glass prison.
First, I give her stacking spoons, blue nesting cups,
a mixing bowl, sugar, water, flour, butter —

she redecorates the kitchen while I make nut bars
and bake scones in heart-shaped silicone moulds.
Then she’s two and we’re both on the floor, greasing tins,
cracking eggs, her hands are miniatures of mine.

Together with one spoon, we stir until she stomps, Me do!
I watch her batter-freckled face, furious
with concentration; stirring, pouring, powdering,
while my trembling fingers smear clots of dough

and broken shells across my face, my neck,
my breasts, my bird-bone ribs.

‘Ingredients (for a mother)’ was first published in Swerve Magazine in 2022.

**

Involuntary Admission

A breast pump stands in the corner
of my psychiatric hospital room
next to a locked chipboard wardrobe.
Somewhere a nurse guards the key
along with answers to the questions
they keep asking: What date is it today?

The pump is four feet high with long
thin tubes wrapped round like limp snakes.
One tube-mouth rests on the base:
a plastic starfish on wheels
transplanted from an office chair,
looking like any moment the pump
will get up, brush its hair,
put on a skirt, and go to work.

It hums, sucking at my shrivelled breasts,
while I nurse its plastic cups.
I am a cow in an automated milking shed
except without the swollen udders.
Nothing is expressed except a few slow drops
barely bigger than a bead of nectar in a fuschia flower.
Only enough to fill a small spoon
or the seed inside a fat grape,
or a pair of those concave hollows contact lenses come in.

I give up pumping.
Sitting on the strange bed
that’s dressed up in my bedclothes,
I think about other tiny things
this much milk could fill
and wonder how long I’ve been feeding her nothing.

‘Involuntary Admission’ was first published in The Waxed Lemon (#6) in 2023.

**

and she flew

With plastic teardrops on soft fingertips,
we hot-glue multicoloured craft feathers
to a cut-out frame. I stick and she snips
semiplumes to lay, each slightly longer

until it is time for ones washed and dried:
snowy seagull contour and flight feathers
we collected together at low-tide
along with mottled plumes from the plover.

Nearly there, we bend them in a gentle
curve to look like the wings of a real bird,
and use glitter duct-tape guided by pencil
marks to attach braided straps to matboard. 

She raises one arm up, then the other —
Unaware, I fasten wings on my child’s shoulders

‘and she flew’ was first published in Not The Time To Be Silent 2022.

**

The Kerry Snail: a Haibun

I am in the passenger seat of a black hearse on the way from Kerry to Cork. The hearse driver is also the mortician, also the funeral director. Small business owners wear many hats in rural Kerry. I’m not the only passenger. My father is in the back, boxed up in cream taffeta and pine, for once being chauffeured instead of being the chauffeur. I wince at every pot-hole bump and bend in the county bounds.

Painter’s clouds on blue sky
inevitably fade to grey mist
at the Cork-Kerry border.

The driver makes sparse conversation to which I reply with some words. The day is oversaturated, surreal. I feel like I am suspended in that momentary pause between breaths. In the future I will come to recognise this feeling as shock. I look out at the iridescent tarmac; the busy ditches; the trees, fat with summer leaves. I remember the first time my father drove me from the airport in Cork to the building site of their new home in Kerry. He swore that every time he passed over the border into Kerry, the rain stayed behind in Cork.

I think about the quiet trees:
how many hearses have
journeyed beneath their leaves?

We reach the point in the winding road near Cascade Woods. This reminds the driver about the Kerry snail. He says to me, “Did you hear about the Kerry snail?” I had heard about the Kerry snail, many times, and how its protection had foiled plans for a multi-million euro bypass, many times. In fact, the driver himself had mentioned the Kerry snail to me 6 weeks previous as we had driven this exact same route. Again just three of us in the hearse, but that time it was my step-mother in the coffin and not my father.

All blame the snail from Kerry,
though the snail is a rare slug
wearing Cork’s colours on its belly.

When I boarded the plane six weeks ago, my step-mother was still alive. She had died by the time I landed. When I arrived at their newly built house in Lixnaw, she was already laid out in the front room. Silent people I didn’t know stood around and stared at her. It was bad at the end. Her body was so swollen the nurse had to cut her underwear off with a scissors. Only seven months earlier she had received the diagnosis. I bought my first pack of cigarettes in two years on the day they called to tell me what the doctors said. Even after the autopsy they couldn’t tell where the cancer had started. I left the wake room and went outside and lit a cigarette.

New calves in the field play
like puppies, oblivious
to the death over the fence.

Grief grows like wheat
in the field under stars
bright in the country-dark.

Famine ruins poke up
through grouse in wild fields
like broken teeth.

I didn’t want to know where he had done it, the details of it. My uncle said he would tell me if I wanted, but I’d be better off not knowing, not having a clear picture in my mind. But as I drove up the road my father had paved himself across three fields to their new house, I looked at every ancient, gnarled tree, assessing which branches were the right shape, which could have held the weight. I saw my father suspended from each one, waiting, alone in the cold dark, the wind shaking him and pulling at his clothes.

I think about the quiet trees:
how many lives have ended
beneath their silent leaves?

The day comes to bring my father back to Cork, to end where he started in the city of his birth. As the hearse engine starts, the driver tells me gently he had hoped not to see me again so soon, and I reply, gently, that I hope after today we never meet again. We pull around the house, start down the long drive. The driver nods to a solid pair of matching white-washed brick sheds still housing moving boxes and building supplies. ‘Best to knock those down, love,’ he says, ‘Start fresh.’ And so, without knowing, he gifts me back the trees.

The sun is always shining
in the Kingdom of Kerry—
except when it does not.

An excerpt of ‘The Kerry Snail: A Haibun’ was first published in Southword (#44) in 2023.

**

The Wild Way

My cottage can hear the midnight ocean
tides bring jetsam, seaweed, and shells
to submissive miles of fine white sand
bound by water, dune, and sky.
Winds blow doubt from my soul,
in the emptiness before dawn I am alive.

The town is asleep but I am awake
to hear wisdom whispered by the ocean
while her whitecap angels strip my soul
to redress with seafoam and oyster shells.
Under dark clouds performing dawn sky,
I walk alone on wild, west-coast sand.

Mermaid toenails sparkle in the sand,
half-buried and dead but in my hand, alive.
Tiny nacre caves capture suns from far sky
to sink their purple flames in mother ocean,
but the oystercatcher and shell collector
have other plans for lost aquatic souls.

In my cotton bag where plastic has no soul,
jingle iridescent petals plucked from sand.
The tinkling chimes sing: shed your shell,
surrender self, connect to life.
I submit and join the dancing ocean
in adagio chassé beneath a bouquet sky.

Wet strand reflects the birth of morning
interrupted by another early soul:
a local breaking day beside her ocean.
She stops me as I bend to pick the sand,
I share I am again glad to be alive
and on his grave will grow a rose of shells.

She says it was these selfsame shells
mothers sought beneath a long-set virgin sky.
Still young and soft and to the top with life,
children foraged baskets full of shellfish souls,
then laughing barefoot over rocky sand dunes,
they drifted home like gifts from the ocean.

‘The Wild Way’ was first published in Augur Magazine 2022.

 —————

Lauren O’Donovan is a writer from Cork, Ireland. In 2023, she won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award and the Cúirt New Writing Prize in Poetry. Lauren’s work has been shortlisted for Listowel Writers’ Week Collection Award, Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition, and the Fish Poetry Prize.