Maria Keenan is a native of county Laois. Having recently completed her third year of studying a BA with Creative Writing at the National University of Ireland, Galway, she has spent the last semester of her studies completing an independent poetry project with the help of her editor-mentor, poet and Galway native, Gerry Hanberry. She has previously been published in Poetry Against Cancer, an anthology in aid of Crumlin Children’s Hospital’.
Sailing
I had always assumed prejudice
against barnacles and limpets
other critters tamed
by the bottom of the boat:
triangular foragers and non-descript
follower fools of engines and
the nights of my ascendants.
My home and manor,
my kingdom afloat and necessary
with no high notions of fatal sinking –
no foragers aboard, and solitude abounds.
So what insult have I given
in a named and humble ship?
What titans have smite
when the oil dims and the gas escapes?
There are few answers in
a staring contest with God
and I row away uneasy
towards the open lips of land.
The Cabaret Encore
The easier way to proposition sex
is to beg for protection,
or so I learned that night
when asked if there was
forfeit of your time in mind.
It becomes the darkest habit:
welcoming a darling each other night and
splitting needles
between veins and gramophones,
but, in song, there is little substance
and I saunter my best while sitting on shoulders
with you at ease in an opiate waltz.
Charmed, secretive yet loud and
unwilling to swap territories,
we recorded documentaries
in the trauma of a lodger;
in faster and faster laps of affection.
The next morning,
flowers fell through the letter box,
crumbling under weighted elegance.
Ready to re-grow with care
and unable to see the wilting,
you crossed the landing,
jeering the last conversation
as I sat, disowned and laughing.
Sleepwalking
It is so gracious,
throwing lovely planets,
distant, high tremblings of light,
but we build Titans of the stars
taking more than one to start
and, incomplete, we look away.
Crime ascends, but you should know
to never defy the walls you build
stealing the corner-bricks
of others’ houses.
A friend was caught
in such an act
with a pistol to his teeth
I understood the bluff and know
even the roguish
have to breathe while sleeping.
I walked away to the ones
I like the sound of after
a couple of hours’ sleep
petting luxuries by blowing out the light.
Counting the cockles of my heart
while swans ate by the mouth
ignoring my hand,
I came gently to the night when beckoned,
and more than me were weary then.
Second Love
I pin spiders by their limbs
noose the thread around the bodies
I collect your older sets of marbles
to suck until they shrink to candies
and write your docile pleasures
in stitched pillows I will hold over your head
I embrace these distractions
until struck by your closing window
I am a great many things
But you were the second love
I was condemned to
Polished, pristine and ready for scuffing
The Galway Review 