The Curfew

The radicals sprung the locks that night, hurrah!

and their lovely collarbones were almost moonly.

Rhinos shrieked and bellowed, elephants tromboned

and the animals nosed into town.

Sunrise to sunrise and sunrise we kept indoors.

If you can’t count your onions, what can you count

my grandfather used to say. He said a lot of things.

Among the other miners he was legendary:

when no more than the thought of the pink crumple

of his infant daughter’s body came to mind

a glow would swell in the pit, the men

would mayhem bauxite by the light

his tenderness emitted.

Some of me lived inside her even then.

The memorial fountain says nothing

of the weeks before the rescue failed

but mentions God which, as my grandfather

used to say, is just the name of the plateau

you view the consequences of your living from.

Or something like that. He said a lot of things.

He grew wise and weary as an albatross

and left for that great kingdom of nevertheless.

It would have pleased his handsome shoulders

to watch this Grizzly scoop for salmon

in the fountain of his friends, or the Bengals,

or the shakedown squad of chimpanzees

who bang and bang on the grocery window.

One by one eleven miners starved to death.

In the streets they collar or tranquillise

the ocelots and run a spike of ketamine

through the plumbing in the fountain.

Dromedaries blue-mood around the pub

aloof under their reservoirs of fat.

I don’t sleep, but oh plateau! these days

of violence have been my happiest.

Even a cabbage is not without desire

my grandfather said one day, and now

among the animals, I feel under my wings

the words for things I thought I knew

departing, and I understand him.

Poetry Ireland Review Issue 121:

Edited by Eavan Boland

Eavan Boland's first issue as editor of Poetry Ireland Review aims to encourage a conversation about poetry which is 'noisy and fractious certainly ... but a conversation nevertheless that can be thrilling in its reach and commitment'. There are new poems from Thomas McCarthy, Jean Bleakney, Wendy Holborow, Paul Perry, Aifric Mac Aodha, and many others, while the issue also includes work from Brigit Pegeen Kelly, with an accompanying essay on the poet by Eavan Boland. Eavan Boland also offers an introduction to the work of poet Solmaz Sharif, while there are reviews of the latest books from Simon Armitage, Peter Sirr, Lo Kwa Mei-en, and Vona Groarke, among others. PIR 121 also includes Theo Dorgan's elegiac tribute to his friend John Montague – a canonical poet, in contrast to the emerging poets Susannah Dickey, Conor Cleary and Majella Kelly, who contribute new work and will also read for the Poetry Ireland Introductions series as part of ILFD 2017.