A winter weekend in Copenhagen

Words for Lone Woman site on sobriety, borders, stereotypes and nature. The interpretations featured on this site are deeply moving and inspiring. 

'Unnameable Things' for The Clearing

'I have found the words for butterflies, in my native tongue, and I am drawing their lines on my insides. I am ready, now, to speak of unnameable things.'

                                 Words for The Clearing at  Little Toller Books on their site now.

This essay was incredibly moving to write, and the fact it was written for this deeply inspiring site has filled me with such gratitude and courage.

'That Further Shore'

https://newwelshreview.com/article.php?id=2272

'That Further Shore' has been highly commended in the New Welsh Writing Awards 2018: Aberystwyth University Prize for an Essay Collection Shortlist. 

"This collection hinging on Northern Ireland is strikingly organised around images of wild animals. Its themes are ‘making place’ through art, exile, transfer, transition and bridges to reconciliation. Its voice is personal, empathetic and political. Classical references, symbols and motifs from the natural world put this entry into the class of literature."

'Atlantic Palimpsest

https://literatureworks.org.uk/national-memory-day-writing-competition-shortlist-announced/


'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.

North

Soft, translucent light shoots down from a far-away place
as the landscape turns green, again, slowly.
Pale neon lichen on top of storm-beaten branches
and I remember Vik; snow falling horizontally onto raven black sand.

Soundscapes of swans and deep white stillness
fills up my insides
and I know that it is coming back, once more;
the circle has started to turn.

White

Iceland, Spring 2013

and yet there is such stillness; buried deep.

Meirge

Last night I dreamed
of heavy rain
-decaying, rhythmic, beautiful,
pounding on an old tin roof.
That northern sky, dark as buried mines,
filled slowly with rusty green dancers;
every lamp in the house was lit.

Garden

Two blackbirds flit in and out
of dead, fallen branches,
in a garden filled with
brand new colour
and a Belfast sink.
Ferns, green and hardy,
trail down from the roof
and the black iron window bars
have started to peel;
beautiful rust outside these
dove grey walls.

The daffodils have begun
to wilt, 
yellow giving way to blue.
Harebells find pathways 
through the woods
and I see apple blossoms
in a new light.
We talk of being children
in an era long gone
and I can smell sea-salt
on my open hands.

Tjaldur

Waiting for the snow to calm,
The land, white and lunar
beneath volcanic heights,
holds its breath.

We journey to the very South
of this Northern Island
in search of barren solitude
and silence.

Water gushes down,
falling like moonlight onto black rocks.
But we can hear no sound at all
from the cliff face,
Until oyster-catchers
undo the bright, still silence;
beautifully.

Alft

I knew that there would be mountains.

Vast, volcanic; violet hues grasping at grey snow-light.

The rift, too, long imprinted on the map on my inside, certain;

almost known.

The moss, botanical expression of courage

alongside memories of horses, brown and wild.

This land of fire and ice; etched in columns of basalt on my mind.

Pink-footed geese fill the fields

and fly powerfully above me; filling the sky with wonder.

And then they appear, against a backdrop 

of wooden Church and cotton bog-land;

elusive and melancholic as the dancing lights .

Painted cream and yellow by the snow and sun;

back from Alba.

No words can frame this moment.

I will hold it, like ice in my hands,

until the Winter comes back home.

West

Iceland

Iceland, Spring 2014.

Words and drawings.

West

Paths wind and meander
through passes made from ice and saga;
a fierce and fragile beauty.

Moss, greener than growth ,
covers volcanic rock;
spills onto damp paper
-circles in Icelandic clay.

Light, white as time/
soft as morning;
stillness atop ancient triangles.

Feathers on wet basalt
as time refracts off
blue spring;
life.

You stand beside a map of glacial water
as I collect elements
in my ice cold hands.

weeds and wild places

I spent five joy filled days on the island of Iceland last week. It was too magical to be truly real but I have drawings, pictures and words to remind me of the majesty the natural world opened up for me. I will slowly share them in this little space here.

'I want to go out into the wakening, blue world with you.' 

Milk flower

February, once more,
and the World is hopping/
outside of one circle,
into the next;
new beginnings.

The sky- red peach
-awakening to the
deep call of crows
at the first frost of morning.

Saint Bride has carried
back the light
on the wings of the oyster catcher
and the islands
are painting their hills
green in gratitude.

I fill my room with lavender
and sea thistle
in brown medicine bottles;
A botanical apothecary of life.

You send words to me
across a stormy sea
and I remember the wild flowers
of Inch island
in August's haze.

But the light is changing/
resurfacing/ reflecting
and all around of us
will be translated
into other words;
written on the wind.

I dress in white, again
and welcome back the snowdrops;
graciously