Brother Don’t look at the rosemary on the fridge
Plenary Indulgence Abrakedabra! and a plume of white smoke Hypothesis So the editor wants to know why First published in The Stinging Fly Seven Sugar Cubes On 10th April, 1901, in Massachusetts, Dr. Duncan MacDougall set out to prove that the
human soul had mass and was measurable. His findings concluded that the soul weighed
21 grams.
When your mother phones to tell you that your father has died
ten thousand miles away, visiting your emigrant brother,
in a different hemisphere, in a different season,
do you wonder if your father’s soul will be forever left in summer?
Do you grapple
with the journey home of the body of a man you have known
since you were a body in your mother’s body?
Does the news melt into you and cool to the image
of his remains in a Tasmanian Blackwood coffin, in the body of a crate
in the body of a plane? Or do you place the telephone receiver back on its cradle,
take your car keys, drive the winter miles to your father’s field, where you know
his horses will run to the rattle, like dice, of seven sugar cubes.
first published in The Irish Times
You Have Become the Hand Rub of an Olympian
When your ashes return
in a small wooden box,
a brass plaque on top,
there is no cord
or record of attachment
to anything or anyone.
Somewhere a uterus
is evacuating itself –
a mass of patient vessels,
surrendering and collapsing
bereft of implantation,
their futile existence spent.
If we were to walk
every inch of the earth
or soar to a distant planet
we’d be utterly sure
of one thing now –
we’d find nothing
of you except these ashes –
not your cadaver
or the bony frame
of your being,
not the protrusion
of your dental arcs.
You’ve been reduced
to chalky powder
like the hand rub
of some Olympian
preparing to bar-cling.
If this box should open,
one accidental sneeze
might spell the resurgence
of your skin cells, hair
follicles, a glutinous eye
or a femur bone. Rewinding,
back-tracking,
you’ve been redacted
to the nothingness of an atmosphere.
(The Pickled Body)
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 Clodagh Beresford Dunne was born in Dublin and raised in the harbour town of Dungarvan Co. Waterford, in a local newspaper family. She holds degrees in English and in Law and qualified as a solicitor, in 2001. During her university and training years she was an international debater and public speaker, representing Ireland on three occasions, at the World Universities Debating Championships. Her poems have appeared in publications including The Stinging Fly, The Irish Times, Southword, The Moth, Spontaneity and Pittsburgh Poetry Review. She was the recipient of the Arts Council of Ireland Emerging Writer Award Bursary (2016) and a number of Literature awards and residencies from Waterford City and County Arts Office. In April, 2016 she delivered a series of readings, interviews and lectures, in Carlow University and Robert Morris University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as part of Culture Ireland’s International Programme. In February, 2017, as part of the AWP Conference and Book Fair in Washington, DC, she participated in a reading and discussion panel: “A World of Their Own” (five female poets in cross-cultural conversation) with US poets, Jan Beatty and Tess Barry, Irish poet, Eleanor Hooker, and Lebanese poet, Zeina Hashem Beck. She is a founding member, coordinator and curator of the Dungarvan and West Waterford Writers’ Group. She lives in Dungarvan with her husband and four young children. |
