Medbh McGuckian was born in 1950 in Belfast, where she lives with her family. She has been Writer-in-Residence at TCD, at Queen's University, Belfast, and Visiting Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley. Her many collections of poetry (all published by Gallery Press), include The Flower Master, Venus and the Rain, Marconi's Cottage and Captain Lavender. 'Copperheads' is taken from her latest collection, Drawing Ballerinas, published recently by Gallery Press.
I think "firelight" and I call the dream
new eye, brushed ankle, dazzling voice,
speech that sounds like speaking,
from the bone-cup of his tongue's root.
The muscles of his long language upswing,
uncommon touch the half-learned language
in my eyes. They train my eyes to live
behind bars, and then to see again
how war itself became lovelier,
long-necked, clove-eyed, with a widow's
walk, travelling passionately from summer
to winter with the terrible velocity
of Demeter. Became more needed
not because he is not there
but because he is. Icy nights
that spiced the killing time
mull the wrenching day.
Our hurried eyes and death-encrusted
mouths long for the first land sound
in the dance of war, a hoarse wind
thinly patriotic, warming and softening
and sharpening that red rim angled
up into petals. Sun-rotted,
she has gardened him, his blowing gold
from black soil, the high yellow
flower of the army in a space
that seemed free of the dead,
in their earth-cloaks and over-essence.
Stark blue, the snow ticks,
shaking the sadness out,
shortening the endless home-
away-from-home war by trying
to regroup, not turning back.
In the northernmost marketplace
they smear grease on the guns
and seal the shells in jugs
like their right to choose the war,
saying, will we have to defend
our re-knowledge of their country
when the tide slopes brown, in one lifetime?