The Academi Cardiff International Poetry Competition

Máighréad Medbh

Turning Point

That was the year his father grew into his bones,
up through the marrow like a liquid tree
that hardened and stretched the mould.
The living past died in his spinal core,
stiffened his joints, made an angle at his waist
and flattened his feet as if they were hobnailed homes.

His skin renewed itself, slower, but much as before.
Only Bronagh noticed how his forehead tightened
when another bill got floored.
Stiff in the morning, shuffling in slippered feet,
the smallest issue, a spillage of milk
broke the back of his mustered will to cope.

It was the year of strikes and foot-and-mouth disease
when funeral pyres turned the air slate,
and farms became silenced compounds.
Nothing ran. Buses and trains stood mute.
Cars and trucks lurked at the border,
cornered like insects by the spray’s sterile advance.

Dotcom companies broke, thousands owed.
Everyday more lettings go.
The floods came and swallowed the fields,
chewed the bank of the river and spat it out.
The path ended at a new place
and winter brought the longest snow for years.

She saw the sense in all the manic sweeping,
and so did he, a natural wisdom
where deep-rooted things survive
and everything unstable ends its time.
Still, when his own dream burned,
his father’s effigy grinned in the fire’s eye.

The failed farm of his childhood, his parents’ retreat
into the dark corners of the house, the split,
glitched his ecleptic and he stood at the door,
rubbing his forehead. Bronagh had begun to leave.
Not age but history was turning him old,
the cruel wheel brandishing its spokes.

Máighréad Medbh was born in Co. Limerick, Ireland and published her first poetry collection, ’The Making of a Pagan’ in 1990. Since then she has worked mainly in performance poetry, with appearances on television and in gigs in Ireland, Britain and the USA. Her poems have appeared in several anthologies. Her second book, ’Tenant’, was published by Salmon Publishing, Co. Clare in 1999, and is a narrative sequence set during the Irish famine of 1845-49. A further collection of poems is due to be published by Salmon in 2003.