Teresa Godfrey’s poetry and short stories have been published in The Honest Ulsterman, Boyne Berries, Rhythm of Hearts, Ireland’s Own, Crannog, Corncrake, North West Words, the Blue Nib, the Community Arts Partnership anthologies Resonance 2018, Find 2019, and Vision 2020, the 2018 Highland Poetry anthology (USA), and Curlew (UK) Her poetry was selected for inclusion in Her Other Language: Northern Irish Women Writers Address Domestic Violence and Abuse. Her first poetry collection titled This, Also, Is Mercy was published by Summer Palace Press in 2021 and her debut novel, Wipe Out, was published by Sunbury Press USA in 2022.
On the Day of My Birth
You could rediscover your forgotten figure
in a boneless, lightweight, one-piece foundation garment,
guaranteed to require neither struggle nor contortion,
for six pounds, sixteen shillings, and six pence.
T. Vasco Ltd, world famous for over half a century,
could offer you, for your Leap Year proposal,
their bubbles short cut perm, for four pounds and four shillings,
including restyling, shampooing and setting.
But if you’d wanted to buy shrimps from Mr J Hornsby
of Norfolk, who was then 46 years old,
you would have had to have been quick because Mr Hornsby
never stopped longer than ten minutes in one place.
Meanwhile, in Dallas, Texas, Mrs William Gammons
was enjoying watching television with her two goldfish.
She first noticed the fishes’ interest during the wrestling.
Mrs Gammons and her goldfish were big fans of the wrestling.
Taken from reports in the Daily Graphic & Daily Sketch, published by Kemsley Newspapers, London, Monday, March 3, 1952. Price 1½d.
Reflection on Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for a Self-Portrait
If we were frightened
we hid it well;
ratcheting out of control
just enough and no more.
The drunk, the boor,
the perfect charmer.
We played them all
right up to the hilt.
You welcomed the lash,
the fist, the yielding.
Submitting to death,
rebirth, death again.
And I, in my wild
and headstrong way,
sought my own oblivions
to shield my young and fragile heart.
Now, face-to-face
in the overlap
of our reflections,
we gaze on each other’s tender beauty.
Armagh 1973
I’m wearing a duffle coat.
My long hair is tumbling
down my back over its hood.
Do I know all these people?
I barely recognise myself.
In fact it may not be me.
I am so young and slim,
my hair is so luxuriant.
I’m not participating,
not shouting, not waving my fists.
My hands are in my pockets.
Police are facing us across a barricade,
one of theirs, not one of ours.
They used to come to my house
to make me look at photographs of myself.
“Is this you?”
“No comment.”
Not photos like this
where my back is facing the camera.
Is this me?
I hope so. Yes.
Let that be me –
young, slim, tumbling, luxuriant.
I claim it all.
It is me. Look!
There I am.
That’s me!
My Father’s Shoes
My mother asked us to find her relatives.
We started in the cemetery.
It was the biggest we had ever seen.
My father’s shoes hurt him,
though he didn’t say until it was too late.
It was a foolish thing
to go to a cemetery
but it reminded us of familiar ground.
We felt at home there
among the trees and stone
though we knew no one.
They were light shoes
– thin-soled, tan leather –
and more suited to the city
than to the endless paths we tracked
among the dead.
And what if we had found them?
They couldn’t have opened their arms to us,
welcomed us with their best wine,
their best coffee.
They couldn’t have told us stories
of how they’d come to be so far
from their birthplace.
They couldn’t have bathed my father’s tender feet.
Nephropid
After the storm
scours the beach
white and dry,
you step lightly
as if your mother
had scrubbed it
like a table
with her own bare hands.
This is how the storm
makes it her place,
not yours.
This is how you know
it was never yours.
This is a fact
you must accept.
After the last storm,
on the beach,
I found a dead lobster
escaped from a creel,
on its way
back to the sea.
Too late.
All night tossed
from the seabed
up through the swirl.
Alive
but trapped,
until the escape
onto dry land.
Lobsters can’t shut down
in shock.
They must endure
their pain
until their nervous systems
are completely destroyed.
I drew it in pen and ink,
painted it in blue,
made a sgraffito triptych;
the creel, the seaweed-tangled rope,
the lobster escaping
to the inevitability
of its death.
The Galway Review 