For Isobel
I
Your father’s alive in our house;
his books talk to ours on the shelves.
His photograph above the piano,
violin tucked under his chin.
You play the pieces he arranged,
quote his sayings and stories,
read his fountain-penned notebook
of favourite poems, Yeats, Frost
and Verlaine, for what
they tell about him.
You would run to keep up
as he walked Three Rock Mountain,
insisting you listen to the latest
from Sartre and Teilhard de Chardin.
Read to me from the Russians, he’d say,
those months when he lay in the Mater.
You cycled from your summer job,
grateful for each day and even
for his request through a medicated blur,
speak clearly and enunciate your words.
II
In a room full of strangers you sit by her side;
she plays with your fingers, fidgets with rosary beads.
She whispers meanderings of mama and dada
back home in Rockcorry and frets about the cows
that broke into the meadow, the stove to be blackened,
feeding corn to the goose, walking her brothers to school.
One day she shouts, you let her slap your hand.
The next she holds onto you. She cries when you leave.
She’s forgotten your name, sees her sister in your face.
She’s floating away from you, a leaf in a slow stream.
Today she smiles, looks you straight in the eye:
Agh Isobel, you’re here. Where have you been?
Jane Clarke, who was born in Roscommon and lives in Wicklow, combines writing with her work as a management consultant. Twice shortlisted for the Hennessy Literary Awards, she won the Listowel Writer's Week Poetry Collection Prize (2014), the Trocaire/Poetry Ireland Competition (2014), Poems for Patience (2013), iYeats (2010) and Listowel Writers Week (2007). Her first collection, The River, will be published by Bloodaxe Books this year
The Blue Bible
Before breakfast we’d kneel
on the kitchen tiles for prayers,
then listen to our father
read a lesson from the blue bible
with sticking plaster along its spine,
a picture beside each story.
We took turns to choose:
the Good Samaritan,
Zacchaeus in the sycamore tree,
the loaves and fishes that grew
and grew to feed the multitudes.
Stories for people who worked the soil,
who watched over flocks of sheep.
We knew those people,
we knew the rain that ruined crops,
the seed that fell on stony ground,
the days when hope,
like a restless heifer, goes astray.
Jane Clarke, who was born in Roscommon and lives in Wicklow, combines writing with her work as a management consultant. Twice shortlisted for the Hennessy Literary Awards, she won the Listowel Writer's Week Poetry Collection Prize (2014), the Trocaire/Poetry Ireland Competition (2014), Poems for Patience (2013), iYeats (2010) and Listowel Writers Week (2007). Her first collection, The River, will be published by Bloodaxe Books this year
Every Tree
I didn’t take the walnut oil, linseed oil,
the tins of wax or my lathe and plane
when I closed the workshop door.
I left the grip of poverty on the bench
beside my mallet, whittling knife
and fishtail chisel with its shallow sweep.
I quit the craft my father had carved into me
when I was pliable as fiddleback grain,
left all at the threshold, except for the scent of wood,
a different scent for every tree.
Jane Clarke, who was born in Roscommon and lives in Wicklow, combines writing with her work as a management consultant. Twice shortlisted for the Hennessy Literary Awards, she won the Listowel Writer's Week Poetry Collection Prize (2014), the Trocaire/Poetry Ireland Competition (2014), Poems for Patience (2013), iYeats (2010) and Listowel Writers Week (2007). Her first collection, The River, will be published by Bloodaxe Books this year
