Teresa O’ Connor-Diskin lives in Moycullen with her husband, Peter. She is a retired teacher who enjoys writing, gardening, walking, art, and travel. Teresa attends Poetry Workshops facilitated by Kevin Higgins.
She was shortlisted for Poems for Patience 2019 and had a poem selected for publication in Skylight 47 in September 2019. She had poems selected for The Galway Review in October and Dodging the Rain in December 2019. She had poems selected for publication in Vox Galvia in August and October 2020, and recently one of her poems has been added to the Poetry in Lockdown collection held in the Irish Poetry Reading Archive at UCD Special Collections.
The Waggle Dance
After David Harsent
A place of growth, colour over green
and beauty everywhere. There was a time when the only sound
when spring arrived, was the bee dancing to her own music
Her delicate poise, when your breath slowed
in wonder your eyes glimpsed her leg’s pollen baskets
on purple profusion, and music about her that can now be heard
less frequently on the warmer side of the planet
Fifty-seven biocides found in one bee;
a third of species threatened, and the disappearing dance
At the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge 1932 *
After William E. Stafford
April the fourteenth, two young men
waited for history, bodies draped
in dark, watching with aided eye
as if it might happen
They were looking at something
of unknown scope
bullet fire, heart of matter cleaved
a phenomenon at the scale end of consequences
Their linear accelerator, a collection of spare parts
synchronous scintillations
In a world that would come to know its significance
In the year dubbed ‘annus mirabilis’
- John D. Cockcroft and Ernest T.S. Walton
Testimony
What is it that draws,
gnaws sinew and bone?
sumptuous light
eyes feast
cerulean cobalt
sparkle pure white
tiny shells single-celled
once on ocean’s floor
strewn black bladder wrack
granite giants
don dark lichen coats
a testament
to unpolluted air
uncovered mica flickers
waves hasten
ooze whitest on white
worship at your feet
to the backdrop of
Na Beanna Beola
where once red curves were cast
floated, swayed, zig zagged
love and loss remembered
The Galway Review 