The Academi Cardiff International Poetry Competition

Kerrie Hardie

Dublin Train, the Nineteenth of December
for my Father

There’s a cold sky and gulls in the new ploughing
and ice on the stretched water glazing the fields.
The year’s nearly done and I’ve not once taken this train till now,
not sat at this window, back facing the future,
watching the landscape unravel into what’s gone.
Your death knocked the thrive out of me.
Knocked the thrive out of the year as well.
The sky is spreading itself out and breaking open
the way that sometimes a poem does, or music, or light. All my life I’ve been trying and trying.

This full-mooned daylight is thin and cold
as the smell of a lemon
and I’m tired of fretting the mind over mysteries,
am nearly ready to give up and not understand.
There’s an ash by a wall in a field above our house.
I go there in winter to find you in the empty branches,
in the way the tree stands to the sky. The dogs quarter, snouts dropped to the smell that has them by the nose. I’m not far off that myself - hard on the scent
when the bird has gone. This is the holiest week of the year,
this descent into dark, into the formless heart of the matter.
Our souls enter our bodies, hungry for experience,
they run us around like the mice that live in the skirting and skitter across the floorboards in the stillness,
their quick, sure darts scoring the emptiness behind the eyes. 

 

Kerry Hardie is the author of ’A Furious Place’ [poetry] Gallery Press, 1996; Cry for the Hot Belly’, [poetry] Gallery Press 2000; and ’Hannie Bennet’s Winter Marriage’, [novel] Harper Collins 2000 [Published as ’A Winter Marriage’ by Little, Brown New York, December 2002.] She is the winner of many prizes including the National Poetry Prize [Ireland] 1996; and is also twice winner of the Women’s National Poetry Prize [Ireland]. She is currently working on a second novel ’The Bird Woman’, and her third collection ’The Sky Didn’t Fal’l is due out in June.