BLIGHTED

by Lynn White

Ireland is to continue funding a United Nations aid agency for Palestinian refugees, notwithstanding claims that 12 of its now suspended employees are accused of taking part in the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel… Foreign Affairs Minister Micheál Martin yesterday praised the “life-saving” work of UNRWA, pointed out that 100 of its staff had been killed in the past four months and vowed that Ireland would continue to fund its work, at a cost of €18m last year. —Irish Independent, January 28, 2024

Once, in Ireland one million died

and we’re still counting.

One million fled 

for their lives

and we’re still counting.

Equivalent to the population

of Gaza

before

starvation ruled the land.

Starvation ruled the land in Ireland

when the potato crop was blighted.

Without potatoes there was no food.

Without potatoes there was no money for food.

Without money for rent colonial landlords evicted,

slave labour of starving men women and children 

followed the rule

through occupation

and colonisation.

And no help came.

No Aid came

to help them.

And still

potatoes were exported.

And still

the landlords did well.

All the colonialists did well.

They always do.

So Ireland knows how it feels

in the depth of its turf,

in the depth of its being,

its rock, its stones, its bones

it knows the story

and that change will come

with survival first

one step at a time

and sometimes words and money 

can effect change

as readily as weapons,

the time the past shows 

the time to make a stand

against political manoeuvring

against a respected decision 

un-welcomed by the most powerful.

History shows the time to make a stand.

For Ireland knows

how lives are blighted.

Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality and writes hoping to find an audience for her musings. She was shortlisted in the Theatre Cloud 'War Poetry for Today' competition and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and a Rhysling Award. Her poetry has appeared in many publications including: Apogee, Firewords, Peach Velvet, Light Journal, and So It Goes.

DOUBLE TRITINA ON THE DEATH OF EAVAN BOLAND DURING A WORLDWIDE PANDEMIC

by Jenna Le




In Eavan Boland’s poem “Quarantine,”
there’s much to be admired: how she rhymes
slant, rhyming 1847 with woman,

say, or how the perished man and woman
in the three lines that start with line 18
are dignified, like headstones touched with rime,

by strict iambic beats. The point that rhymes
most richly with me, living as a woman
in a world starved gray by quarantine

in this year of our Lord COVID-19,
however, is the way that Boland’s rhymes
affirm love’s primacy: I’m not the woman

her poem describes, the starving Irish woman
whose feet, for lack of shoes of soft sateen,
molded themselves against her husband’s grime-

dark chest; yet Boland’s poem reminds me I’m
a member of the cult of man and woman,
built like a virus from the same protein.


Jenna Le is the author of Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011) and A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2017), a Second Place winner in the Elgin Awards. She was selected by Marilyn Nelson as winner of Poetry By The Sea’s inaugural sonnet competition and by Julie Kane as winner of Poetry By The Sea’s sonnet crown competition the following year. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in AGNI, Denver Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Poet Lore, and West Branch. 

FOR DOLORES O'RIORDAN: 1971-2018

by Dana Yost






The way I’d shudder at it,
the way anger and grief
mingled and wrapped around
until they’d become a growl

of exasperation, anger manifest
in the ferocity, the flagellation of your primal strum,
the way a person would pound
a hard-clenched fist on a table

and say sorry, all, I've had enough.
As if you were tired of it, the bombs
and guns, little boys dead. How it goes ’round,
and you tire of it. How I tire of it.

The sorrow interlaced with your anger might
explain my weeps. Or is it the tender brogue,
lingered notes that cry your wounds,
what a critic called your “fierce vulnerability?”

I saw it, I heard it, even before I knew
of the deeper dark within you: my deeper
dark, too. It’s the dark we claw to escape, its hounding,
but never shall we, because to do so we’d have

to escape ourselves.
The earth took your body this week.
As long as I live, it will not take your voice.

The bombs, the guns will not take this world.


Dana Yost is a poet, author and former award-winning daily newspaper editor and writer. His most recent book is a history book 1940: Journal of a Midwestern Town, Story of an Era.

SUNFLOWERS

by Ed Madden

for Dónal, Dublin, May 2015

At dinner in Dublin only days before
the vote, a friend told a story about
being on the 13 crosstown bus,

carrying a bunch of sunflowers for Gary.
He was wearing his Tá Comhionannas pin.
A drunk began to harass him, snatched

at the flowers, pulled off the head of one.
He said the Dublin grannies on the bus
got the driver to throw the fellow off

at the next stop. One picked up
the broken flower, returned it to him, saying
something about his girlfriend.  When he replied

that the flowers were for his boyfriend, he said,
the whole bus seemed to be filled
with grannies talking about the referendum—

all the rest of the way all the Irish
grannies telling me they’re voting yes.
Oh, to be on that bus.


Ed Madden is an associate professor of English and director of the Women's and Gender Studies program at the University of South Carolina.  He is the author of 4 books of poetry -- Signals, Prodigal: Variations, Nest, and Ark (to be published spring 2016).

RUN-UP

by Rachael Stanley






little girls in
communion dresses
Dublin city awash
with marriage -
equality posters


Rachael Stanley's poems have been published in various print and online publications. She also has an interest in shorter form poetry such as Haiku, Haibun and Tanka. She is from Dublin, Ireland where she currently lives.

STUD MUFFIN

by James Penha

“A bull branded gay, has been saved from the slaughterhouse by charity donations, including £5,000 from Sam Simon, co-creator of the Simpsons. . . . Benjy, from County Mayo, Ireland, was destined for the abattoir after showing more interest in breeding with other bulls than cows." --BBC News, November 18, 2014. Photo by Joanna McNicholas accompanying the BBC story.

The great white bull is no Moby Dick:
no taste for violence, no hunger
for limbs, no desire to judge black
from his own white, no passion
for bovine of the opposite sex; just
a yen for grass and peace
and an eye for the other studs.
The farmer called it queer, raised
his arms to slaughter this beast
that knows nothing of appetites.


James Penha edits The New Verse News.

IRELAND

by Laura Rodley

'Spring Lamb' by Cliff Donaldson, Northern Ireland. Image source: IFAJ

Where the little people ride the wee lambs
round the pasture, down the locks, through the jams
to the high circle on top the hill, where
clouds touch the earth and angels’ long, long hair
is roped into ladders by leprechauns there
to swing on, smoke their tiny pipes, no swipes
at other wee people, just the big hypes
that close their eyes to the wee one’s presence,
but there he sits, swinging, lambs leaping, rents
in the primroses, a tasty fare, then
rosy fingers of morning cover them.
Leprechauns leaps upon lambs’ back, through fence,
hazelnuts, past loch, jams, through the long rents
leprechauns tore for their jaunt, recompense   
the gold they lay by the bleating ewes’ nest
gold that can only be found by those that
believe wee people exist, and prat-
tle out loud asking for their small favors,
granted if the leprechaun so savors.


Laura Rodley’s New Verse News poem “Resurrection” appears in The Pushcart Prlze XXXVII: Best of the Small Presses (2013 edition). She was nominated twice before for the Prize as well as for Best of the Net. Her chapbook Rappelling Blue Light, a Mass Book Award nominee,  won honorable mention for the New England Poetry Society Jean Pedrick Award. Her second chapbook Your Left Front Wheel is Coming Loose was also nominated for a Mass Book Award and a L.L.Winship/Penn New England Award. Both were published by Finishing Line Press.  Co-curator of the Collected Poets Series, she teaches creative writing and works as contributing writer and photographer for the Daily Hampshire Gazette.  She edited As You Write It, A Franklin County Anthology, Volume I and Volume II.