Breath-taking sentience: Cathal Ó Searcaigh introduces Kate Newmann at the Errigal Arts Event, Donegal, Ireland

Oranges are Cheap Today – Cheaper than Yesterday

Somewhere there are oranges
and moths the mottle of tree bark.
Somewhere the words ‘turmeric’ and ‘cumin’
are grinding to an aromatic halt.

Above the spice-mill
in the terrified eaves
Anne Frank’s family
lose the habit of speech.

The wallpaper is stained copper beech.
Anne pins up Ginger Rogers, Leonardo da Vinci,
the chimpanzees’ tea-party in London Zoo.

The walls have taught her
how to stay bladstil – still as a leaf.
For days she eats boiled lettuce,
which wilts to an unsayable sludge.

She has already filled the margins,
written across the canals of memory
in both directions. The walls abridge it all.

The floor is a ration book.
She exchanges her valerianed footfall
for a rectangle of stifle.

Pale, she bleaches the fine hair
on her upper lip
and is glad, when through the membrane of despair
her monthly cycle returns:
the body’s ludicrous trust
in its own future.

Her nerves have learnt
a faltering night cadenza,
her hands moving over
the soft refrain of her breasts.
Across the chairs where she sleeps
there is no room for the heart’s octaves
to stretch out
only the small dance of lungs, pulse, gut
and the mortifying timpani of peeing in a pot.

 

Sometimes earth collaborates
and smuggles in a glut of ripening.
So many peas – their shelled monosyllables
pocking into the bowl,
Anne thumbing out the flesh
from each pod, leaving a daze
of veined translucence;
the smell, indoors, of country rain.

And watching her father
bottle what is to come
in the colour red;
boiling the strawberries
a second time
for fear of anything going to waste.

Somewhere, a woman cycles
across Amsterdam
in heavy fog,
a bag of oranges
secreted.

Somewhere a man – not a Jew –
who sold her the oranges
and never asked.

Somewhere shadows rounded up,
bullied back into human form.

Somewhere the man is in a cattle truck.
The man who sold the oranges
locked in a cattle truck for days.
Somewhere he is coming to answer a door slowly,
both his legs lost through frostbite.

 

Above in the attic
a hand closes over the pitted planet
of an orange’s outrageous wholeness,
too zest, too pith,
too flesh to bear.

 – First published in Grim, Arlen House Press, 2015

** 

Well Well Well                                                                                

Rishikesh, Rishikesh, Rishikesh,
Ashram, Maharishi, Mahesh, Rishikesh
the place in your outbreath.

We made a mistake – that’s all.
The Maharishi running after you
pleading ‘Talk to me! Wait!’

Before I don’t believe in Buddha I don’t believe in Beatles
there were turmeric stains instead of tobacco,
not LSD but fenugreek in your veins.

Your days were hammocked between
the soft snoring of Cynthia in the next room
and the stops in Yoko’s daily telegrams

LOOK – UP – AT – THE – SKY –
AND – WHEN – YOU – SEE – A – CLOUD –
THINK – OF – ME –

I love you like guitars.

Each day’s pilgrimage
to the Post Office, sending
little vibrations from India –
a letter to your father, P.S.
forgot your address.

Ringo left when he ran out of baked beans.
You stayed until you ran out of Absolute Bliss.
Down from the mountains, far from India

– Nobody told me – in America – I found out.
Imagine – shopping lists in place of mantras:

Large dose Vitamin C Tablets
Orange honey marmalade
Bend in the River – VS Naipal
Peas (the Korean Shop Shells Them)
Hamburger Meat (for the Cat!)
Potted flowers to be sent
each day to Yoko.
Something wrong with Kitchen Air Con.
and a fear-swathed complaint
that the locks don’t work.

Before our artist friend Simon knocked on the door
distraught in his pyjamas at 5am
when the news came through.

Before he painted you – the canvas
draining of colour as both your eyes
on one side of your face

see the man whose bullet
empties you of time.

Rishikesh, Rishikesh – you left it
but it never left you. The Himalayas
out of sight – the meltwater, the loss –
their breath on you.

Dear John,
……….We are just
……….The sky is
……….Wish you were

**

Fathomless

The Kitchener Monument at Marwick Bay,
a stout tower on the horizon,
gives nothing away.

Lord Horatio Herbert Kitchener
lost with Oswald Fitzgerald,
his closest aide, by his side.

The cruiser, HMS Hampshire,
hugging the west coast of Orkney
in June 1916. The command?
The bad weather? The 18 knots?
The mines? The mines?
The sea’s ruthless capacity
to forget the truth.

Lord Kitchener had boarded a night train at King’s Cross,
hurtled seven hundred miles north
to Thurso, embarking at Scapa Flow,
thirsting for departure
and the chill anchorage of Archangel
and North Russia
and the mission to speak with the Tsar.

His eyes still peering
from biscuit tins and tea-towels.
Posters peeling off lamp posts
in the nation’s dream.
His finger pointing.
His eyes following young men
to their deadly destiny.
He had been careful
to burn all his papers.
Your Country Needs You.
Your Country Needs You.

The local lore of drowning
has it that sailors kick off their boots
before abandoning ship
if there is time. There was no time.
No shoes strewn among the sand,
the bouquets of swaying kelp.

They say the ship hit a mine,
lights failing, engine thrusting, propellers still churning.

His letters to his sister Millie
talk of orchids, and his pet poodle
and how the yellow silk should be trimmed
with orange satin or gold lace.

When Millie could not make contact with him
at a seance, she believed him still alive
(in a cave in Orkney or in Russia with the Tsar?).

Kitchener’s collection of fine porcelain
was sent from Cairo to his family.
Every cup and saucer was intact,
wrapped carefully in the newspaper
announcing his death.

As his name receded
into the No-Man’s-Land of conspiracy theories:
…Bolsheviks? Irish Nationalists? a German spy?…
dead bodies were washing up.

He may not have been recognised
despite being 6 ft 2, his once-piercing
ocean-blue eyes. The ocean
has its own genius for disguise.

Growing up in County Kerry
Kitchener knew the power of tidal pull.
As his lethal allure guttered out
in the unstaunchable waste
of the Somme.

The gritty sediment
of the seabed rummaging through his pockets;
sea creatures closing mollusc-like
on each fleshy fact.

The islanders,
desperate to help,
rushed to the dusk-dim shore.
People who understood
how waves and rocks barter life
 – and where –
were sent away from there,
stopped in their tracks
and turned back.

Told that this time,
they were not needed,
should not answer the Call.

Only twelve survivors.
Seven hundred and thirty-seven lost.
Fulmars and guillemots scatter the silence.

The people of Orkney
gathered the money.
They themselves
erected the monument
above Marwick Bay
which would at least tell
that here

This tower was raised…in memory
of Field Marshal Earl Kitchener of Khartoum…

 – First published in Cyphers, issue 99, 2025

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Kate Newmann is an Irish poet. She read at the 25^th Medellin International Poetry Festival, Colombia, and at the Himalayan Echoes Festival in Nainital, India. She has been involved in many projects, including creative writing with student teachers at a summer camp in Vyborg, Russia, and with the Chickasaw Nation, Oklahoma, USA.  She has published five collections of poetry.

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