Louis Mulcahy’s poetry has been accepted for publication in many journals including The Stinging Fly, The Stony Thursday Book and Revival and read on RTE1 and Lyric FM. He got to a short list of five for the Collection of Poems competition at Writers’ Week, Listowel in 2008 and 2010. In 2004 he received an Honorary Doctorate from the National University of Ireland. A collection of his Irish language poems is to be published in 2012.
Two poems bu Louis Mulcahy
Going To Jette
Going to Jette’s wedding,
Dublin to Kópenhavn,
humping carefully wrapped presents.
Morfar’s checklist:
penge, pass, papirer.
Nail scissors?
In big suitcase.
Sure?
Sure.
Definite?
Yes.
Practise makes perfect.
How many times have we
lost our scissors to the customs?
Repeatedly chastised,
we, the perfect passengers,
have no scissors in our hand baggage.
Repetition, as the teacher said,
the secret of success.
We will never again,
have a scissors in our bags.
Barriers, crowds, x-ray machines;
long queues removing shoes,
laptops, belts and change.
Pray no holes in socks.
No holes—relief and then:
Is this your bag?
x-rayed
one wedding present:
six small knives, six big knives.
Daggers in their eyes.
Fathoms
Phosphoric glints from primal depths,
escape exogenous layers
and feed Pelagian thought.
So deep in less-than-human span,
so dark despite the intense beam.
Salvation in planktonic gen:
tiny seeds of truth
so ravenously consumed
to emerge as potent logic
explaining and absolving
a traitor to lineage and song.
The Galway Review 