Nuala O’Farrell is a late-emerging poet who has dedicated her life to both medicine and literature. Having worked as a General Practitioner, she now teaches “Narrative Medicine,” a field that beautifully marries her dual passions. Nuala finds inspiration in the hills of Connemara, where she and her late husband spent countless joyful days walking the mountains and cycling the bog roads of Galway. Her poem “The Last Sheep Farmer” was published online in the magazine “Gypsophila” last year, and “The Perfect Egg” was featured on Sunday Miscellany. Nuala’s latest work, “The Laird of Roundstone,” continues to showcase her poetic talent.

The Laird of Roundstone

(for Robin)

It is five years now since you abandoned
Your earthly body,
Your glare of unbearable pain
Burning
Through the retinae,
Of even
The most casual acquaintance.

But I,
I could not let you
Die.

I imprisoned you, in my mind’s eye,
In the claustrophobic corridors of cancer
In the myopic miasma of perpetual longing,
In the subtle destructive savagery of regret,
In the thick black locked box
Of salvaged memory,
Sinking,
A thousand fathoms deep.

Until,
Until, I saw you.
I truly saw you,

Cycling along the bog road, against the wind,
With the Twelve Bens nodding sagely in the distance,
Or climbing up the steep spur of Errisbeg, from “No dogs,”
Or smooching, behind a rocky outcrop, in the rain,
And laughing, always laughing,
At life’s absurdity,
And watching, with cherished pint, the evening sun
Paint a hint of vivid pink, on a cloudy Western sky.

So that I,
Even I,
I had to let your spirit,
Fly.

The Perfect Egg

Sometimes,
In the evenings,
I look back to see
If the shadow of my mother
Is watching me.
And she is.

She being
The daughter of a woman who
Could crack eggs
Cleanly down the middle,
Yellow yolk in one half,
White in the other
Never varying the pace
Of her eternal busyness.

Her own mother rode bareback,
And barefoot, worked the fields,
And had the bare-faced effrontery
To refuse
To give a tenth of all her eggs
To lord Killuah at the castle.
Risking eviction, she preferred
To feed her children.

She loved the shape
Of my head, my grandmother
Mother said,
And stroked it
On her deathbed,
The perfect egg.

Sometimes,
In the evenings,
I look back to see
If the shadow of my mother’s mother
Is watching me,
And she is.
Always.

The Last Sheep Farmer

(For Willy Lydon)

His face cracked
With grief
When Nora died.

They lived on the side
Of that barren mountain
All their lives,
Speaking a language
Nobody really
Understood.
The dry stone walls
Now gap-toothed
With neglect.
Everybody else
Had either emigrated
Or died.