'Atlantic Palimpsest' has found a home at The London Magazine after being shortlisted for The National Memory Day Prize.
https://www.thelondonmagazine.org/atlantic-palimpsest-kerri-ni-dochartaigh/
‘Atlantic palimpsest’
-for Heaney and the Peace Bridge
Grey and greying sky
reflected in choppy body,
as our matching heron
performs his balancing act for all to see.
The Donegal hills,
patient,
waiting; barren,
call a siren song,
lost and piercing- on the wind.
ours is a past seeped in rust.
a history bathed in thick, black squelch;
M U D L A R K I N G, always, for our sense of self.
waiting for that ancient bogland
to spit
and spew
and remould
our memory of last Winter,
in all its terrifying beauty.
The years that have passed
are like a body now lost
to the sea: already long gone
many moons before that dark body of water
swallowed it up
-claiming-maiming; tossed
-out and in along a coast line
that will not claim ownership, in the harsh grey spell of morning.
Things hidden under the surface
that cannot
cannot
be kept in the belly of the sea.
Memories that are washed up
all along the tideline- obscuring the path
not yet solid; the future not yet in seed.
I gather spat up objects, broken things and leftover parts of the storm
and begin to see them, clearly, in all that fragile, unstoppable beauty;
under a thundering, Island-thick sky.
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