Trevor Conway, a Sligoman living in Galway since 2005, writes mainly poetry, fiction and songs. He has recorded an album of his songs, released in 2013. His work has appeared in magazines and anthologies across Ireland, Austria, India, the UK, the US and Mexico, where his poems have been translated into Spanish. These publications include ROPES, Decanto, Read This, Fusion, The Literary Yard, Cuadrivio, Periodico de Poesia, Poetic Expressions and Poetry Salzburg Review.
Subjects he’s drawn to include nature, creativity, football and people/society, especially the odd ways in which we look at the world. In 2011, he was awarded a Galway City Council bursary. He is a contributing editor for The Galway Review, and his first collection of poems is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. (See trevorconway.weebly.com)
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The Taste of Raspberries
I bit into a peach,
And somehow, the sour kick
Of flesh softened by four days’ waiting
Reminded me of raspberries,
Dunally raspberries,
Skulking behind the fir trees of my childhood home.
We’d pinch them off like eggs from a nest,
Be on our way
Across the rocky stream dipping and tumbling to Sligo town,
Or whipped by low twigs
As we scurried between trees,
A burst football or two
Kicked to the base of each trunk.
Sometimes, kids from fields away
Would come to play
(Or cousins, measured in roads).
They’d steal a berry or two.
Today, I’ll buy my fruit in the Galway market,
Sure to pluck a Sligo face
Shining between the shoulders and scarves.
Here is where they come some Saturdays.
I’ll cross the Corrib,
Atlantic spray webbed to my window.
I play in Salthill, too,
But I’ve never found a raspberry
At the bottom of the ocean.
The Galway Review 