poems

8/23

“5- Dingle”

Today I tread the hem of Ireland’s summer dress;   Inch Beach billowing in breeze, brisk by seaside – sly peaks beside a timid tide – beige sand iridescent under layers of saltwater and sun.   I ride on the hills of her overskirt, fabric patched with emerald and brown, spattered with a pattern of […]

8/22

“4- Cliffs of Moher”

I’ve captured the cliff’s whistle in my curls.   That crash of the tide against a shoreline of pebbles histories below me – the way it reverberates between the cliff’s curled lips and carries up in gusts to hum for me.   I’ve let my hair down to embed that echo and keep it caught […]

8/22

“3- Ennis”

The toy box town a couple hours’ drive down can hear echoes of the fiddles busking street side –   Folk songs catch between cobblestones under tapping sean-nos toes – slippery tunes from splashing whiskey and rain from the morning storm –   Fishermen anthems, beer battered and caught hook line and sinker.  

8/21

“2- Clifden”

This town is a toy box.   Lego blocks of bars and coffee shops, perfect square apartments and pastel-colored complexes, stacked edge to edge with little lego people milling between doors, damp and dodging the drizzling rain.

8/20

“1 – Westport”

1 Bashful mountains hiding under billows of cloud, like Ireland exhaled up from its base and whispered secrets carried in whips of white to the sky.   2 When every moment is a meditation folding under curling green at the base of the hills

Galway Days

If my feet had been painted blue, I’d have marked a welcome mat parallel to the Galway bay, toe prints equidistant, fabric crisping in the Irish air –   Mornings still and smooth like butter churned the night before – taken from the fridge for an early Irish breakfast to fuel the busy workday ahead.

Predispositions

These quiet mornings are cuts of cow tongue hung from braided wire in a conditioned room –   their fumes latch onto recycled air in search of an escape route from the silence.

Extraordinary Things

On days like this the unkempt edges of my perspective are tailored with gilded lace, stitched in such a way that I can’t look at it straight but its iridescence reflects into my vision and I watch the world with gold in my eyes.

When Form Reflects Content: On Beauty and Truth

In his elegy “Lenox Hill”, Agha Shahid Ali recounts to his mother on being asked by the universe, “So, how’s the writing?” To this question, he responds, “My mother/ is my poem”. Upon reading this piece, I had never more intensely resonated with a line. Poetry, to me, is the barest, most candid manifestation of […]

Morning News

When I make breakfast in the morning, I tune in to a YouTube CNN live stream and listen to shiny podiums and hairgel discuss how this breaking news will probably bring about the end of the world, and I slip an extra splenda into my coffee to account for the apocalypse coming after these messages.