Anne Marie Kennedy is an award winning writer of fiction, non-fiction, drama and varied verse. 

She is a champion poetry slammer and small farmer, lives in rural Galway with her husband and a menagerie of four legged people.

She teaches creative writing across the genres and works as a freelance journalist. www.annemariekennedy.ie

2020, A Donkey’s Perspective

By Anne Marie Kennedy

That’s me in the middle, the smoky eyed handsome one with my two daughters; Tootsie on the left and Peigi Leitirmór to the right, aged eight and six respectively. You could see they both take after my side, strong genes, not saying anything derogatory about their fathers’ genes, yeah, they have one each, a modern day, blended family, that’s us. 

Ah, I was young, foolish, easily led, (ahem!), when I met Tootsie’s father, bred in Annie Geoghegan’s renowned stud farm, a smasher he was, good looking but not much else; broke my heart he did, broke a lot of things, broke out of the paddock every chance he got, scaled every railing, limestone wall and barbed wire fence in the parish. The humans found him grazing the consecrated church grounds one night, another time he spent the night helping himself to the blousy begonias in the barrack’s yard. He came to a sad end, trying to clear a five bar iron gate, Arkle-style, in order to ‘socialise’ with a field of thoroughbred mares, got suspended by his manhood’s tender dangle on the top rung and died from the fright.  

Peigi’s father was a handsome Connemara jack, a coat of jet black, straight teeth and the smartest gait you’d ever see, a right charmer, belonged to a nice Athenry man, Johnny Healy, (RIP). That bucko just wasn’t the parenting kind, nothing for him but fun and games, hightailed it before she was born, left me high and dry, but like I had promised, I named her after his people.  

And here we are in Spring 2021, with the year ‘the thing’ came behind us. It wasn’t all bad, didn’t we love having our favourite humans around and the fun we had hanging out over the front gate because of all the activity; families out walking, children of all ages coming to pat our noses, scratch behind our ears, rub our faces, some brought treats, apples, carrots – we get more than our fair share of carrots, a packet of Gingernut biscuits would go a long way, just saying, like.

We were photographed from sun-up to sundown, we’d be exhausted from posing, taking selfies, captions like ‘me and my ass,’ and ‘just arsin’ around’ were popular with the women! We’ve thoroughly enjoyed meeting you all, delighted to know how you appreciate the walks and runs in our small boreen, if we could only get the word out about the GNB’s…