Ciaran Berry

Things weather fast here, soon bird will be bone,

brittle and white, dead twig snapped underfoot

where the sky alters in seconds, shine to shower,

and harsher truths hit home hour after hour –

the sundew snagging flies, settling to eat,

a fat gull’s fractured keen that cuts through stone.

Swell pummels rock, darkens sand, creeps upshore

            to stir beach stones and periwinkle shells,

            the bone-dry bladderwrack and sea lettuce

out of which swarms of flies rise, disturbed,

to hang their scrim above the waterline,

            a low fog of wing, thorax, abdomen.

Mulkerrins was older, always on the cod,

swearing to God that bats drank blood from cows,

that dog piss could cure warts. Behind his house,

amongst the sedge and ferns, the sally rods

his mother kept to tan his hide, there stood

a drystone shed where that year’s spuds were stored.

Inside, Kerr’s Pinks fingered their white shoots towards

the light that skulked beneath the door. We would

steal in there when the coast was clear to look

through his Uncle Colm’s stash of dirty books.

Mulkerrins would name the parts, “fanny” and “dick,”

and, once, undid his pants to do a trick

of hand movements and moans that made him split

and bleed something pure white, like cuckoo spit.