A bit of Irish Poetry

As I posted on my Galway Rover blog today, the last few days have been about poetry a lot, and I've been thinking a lot about other people's poetry (WB Yeats and Seamus Heaney in particular) as well as writing my own.

I wrote a rhyming poem over breakfast my first day in Ireland called Recipe for a Perfect Irish Morning which you can read at the Galway Rover, I wrote a song this morning after visiting Thorr Ballylee (Yeats' house/16th century Norman tower), and I wrote another poem tonight after I peeled a pile of potatoes for dinner. It's a cheeky little thing I came up with musing on the relationship between pototoes, vegetable peelers, and life in general, and I think it sounds a bit like Seamus Heaney. I was thinking of Blackberry Picking while I was writing it.

Like an anxious lover

stripping off the clothes of his beloved

or rather like a teenage boy too overexcited for a taste of a girl's white thighs

so my potato peeler sloughs off the dirt-rich clothes of the potatoes,

revealingthe white flesh underneath,

so like a woman's, strong and firm and full of life,

brim-full with nourishment.

Leaves bits of skin behind, it does, the broken straps and bursted seams

of the hurried coupling. I'll clean those up later, l

eaving the flesh white mounds to sit on the counter

whilst the peeler goes on to make love to another potato,

strip off another set of clothes

and lay the same age-old waste.

We'll all go the same way some time,

flesh forgotten, set aside to boil into oblivion,

whiteness forgotten, the virgin days of youth spent,

finally eaten up by death and the Almighty

with a side of onions that were cut with grief-tears

and a pat of butter that could have once been the milk of kindness.