Seaweed, a new poem by Eiléan Ni Chuilleanáin

for Thomas Dillon and Geraldine Plunkett, married April 23rd 1916

Everything in the room got in her way,

the table mirror catching the smoke

and the edges of the smashed windowpanes.

Her angle downward on the scene

gave her a view of hats and scattered stones.

She saw her brother come out to help

with the barricades, the wrecked tram

blocking off Earl Street, then back inside.

- and for the man in the room, obscured

by her shadow against the window

the darkening was a storm shifting his life

- he wondered, where were they now, and would

this perch above the scene blow apart soon,

and he imagined the weeds that sink their filaments

between rocks to nourish a life in water

until all of a sudden they’re sheared away to sea.

And out at sea the gunboat was bucking and plunging,

throwing up spray. The weeds are slapped

back again on sharp rocks beside beaches

that are sucked bare by the storm after this one,

their holdfast plucked away. He was thinking,

would they find a place and lose it, blown away

again, and find another, on the western coast,

as the seaweed is landed, a darkness in the dark water.

Eiléan Ni Chuilleanáin’s collections include Selected Poems and The Boys of Bluehill ( both Gallery Press ). She was a winner of the Griffin International Poetry Prize and is the recently appointed Ireland Professor of Poetry