BAILE AN GHOILIN / BURNHAM EAST

Ger Duffy

town of the fork/Burnham – a yeoman

Turn right at the fork, seven starlings ogham 

a wire, loosestrife/montbretia/ragwort/fuchsia 

thistle/dog roses – a rat dashes in front of you. Trees 

sway with psithurism – so loud you think someone

is banging a bodhran behind you. Through the school 

window – a statue of the Virgin, curved rail of a bunkbed. 

Across the bay, Dingle, unfathomable in mist. 

The black dog you walk lunges at walkers, cowers 

at sheep. Go uphill, past fleece-heaped gates, 

vacant land with small upright stones – famine burials.  

That farmer, who tears up the lane in his quad 

turns his back to you. From the barn, a chorus of whines

and yelps, you stop, more whines and yelps. At the graveyard,

Siobhan Ni Chlerigh, age 25, hunger strike, 1926.  

Turn back at the yellow sign where the lane ends, 

past drooping bushes, where berries hang like bloody 

clots festooned with bluebottles. Watch the scalloped 

shore of Ventry Bay, where headless corpses were laid, 

when corpses were plentiful here. Cows stare back

from the shelter of a derelict cottage, rain sweeps 

across the bay like an old grey shawl. 

Ger Duffy lives in SE Ireland. She has been writing poetry for the last 4.5 years. She works as a teacher. She also runs a community writing workshop called Speak Your Truth and hosts a poetry event in Waterford, called The Poetry Lounge which provides a platform for poets to launch their new poetry books. Her poems have been published in PNR, Poetry Ireland Review, Banshee, Under the Radar, Southword, The Stony Thursday Book, The Waxed Lemon, Drawn to the Light Press and The Milk House.

In 2024, she won the Desmond O'Grady Poetry Award, The Redline Competition and her pamphlets were commended in the International Poetry & Pamphlet Competition and shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Award and she was awarded an Agility Grant by the Arts Council of Ireland. Her poems have been placed second in the Goldsmiths' International Poetry Competition 2020, Travels with Joyce Competition 2022, Write by the Sea Competition 2023 and shortlisted in the Redline Competition 2021 & 2022, The Francis Ledwidge Poetry Competition 2022, The Allingham Competition 2023 and The Verve EcoPoetry Competition 2024.