For Iseult
In the Rotunda delivery suite
Muffled midsummer sounds
Seep through an eighteenth-century sash.
Your clarinet solo a police siren,
That ambulance horn a baritone sax,
The traffic's tympani and trombones
With jackhammers, wrecking balls,
And the street-painter's Christ
Of a pro-life procession.
A Roma there on cardboard, a barber
Chorus, a barefoot clubber
Clutching her heels, and a vixen
From the Garden of Remembrance
Cat-walking the tramlines
En route from Chinatown
To a bin in Little Africa.
This is for you, a daughter's daughter,
My own, my amniotic city
As the midwives wash you briskly
Within sight of a freshwater faucet
Where I'd meet my own granddad,
Gabardine open, tie thrown back,
And humming good old Gershwin
At the marble tub of the font.
He remembered drinking from it
Like a street-corner baptistry
Among draft-horses twenty hands high
Where you come gushing now, brand-new,
With a widow's peak and wizened feet
And seeing the world in sepia.
Aidan Mathews is a poet, dramatist and fiction writer whose most recent collection Strictly No Poetry (Lilliput Press) was published last year.
POETRY SUBMISSIONS GUIDELINES
Poetry submissions should be sent via email only, to poetry@irishtimes.com. No hard copy manuscripts and no single poem submissions. Please submit 3/4 unpublished poems. Due to volume of submissions it is not possible to provide feedback on individual poems. If poems are not accepted there should be no further submission for six months and if published for a year.
