Lynda Tavakoli lives in County Down where, over the years, she has facilitated both adult creative writing classes and the Seamus Heaney Award for schools. She is a professional member of The Irish Writers Centre and has been a nominated for Best of the Net Awards and the Pushcart Prize (2024). Lynda’s debut poetry collection, ‘The Boiling Point for Jam’ (Arlen House), has received wide acclaim for its raw honesty and authenticity. She is presently working on her second collection.
St Symphorien Cemetery, Mons
(i.m. John Parr and George Ellison)
Under a gash of green between headstones,
whispers shrive confessions from the soil,
a paired history spliced by coincidence,
the last and the first, the first and last.
Your soldiers’ voices ricochet, tongue to tongue,
bulletwords of war, a share of confidences
through a century of tortured sleep.
The other’s breath has known your cheek,
tasted your mouth, touched the sadness of your soul,
but the sniper-sharpness in your eyes remain
to ghost away romantic notions
fashioned from an accident of chance.
See instead, between your sleeps,
a truth of corpses stenched in sludge –
the never to return again inheritance of war,
and when your almost touching distance is complete,
pray the cost has drenched our consciousness.
War and Want
The dust is first – always,
before the sun crisps the skin
or sand moulds molten heat
between our toes,
there is always and ever
the dust to welcome us.
No orifice hides from its gritting,
no spit or piss protected from
the chaff of misted rock
that scrapes its way inside –
the powdered bones of the dead
ghosting their revenge.
Yet in the sleeping hours
I still dream of you,
beautiful even in the way
that angels are
who smile their enigmatic smiles
among the bloodied spoils of war.
For I feel the rise and fall of us
lusting my nights like the killings
that also lust my days,
and will you forgive
my need for you
when you learn
of my hunger for both?
But you are not to know
these soldier thoughts
that scar my days and nights –
for the thing that was first is last, always,
disintegrating again to the fineness of dust
welcoming us all.
My First Knee
A coil of concertina wire
serpenting bone-dried space,
red shirt and grey pants
speaking nothing of age,
parameters down to
how he holds a stone.
Minor or adult, sometimes hard
to tell the difference.
Everything I trained for
distils to this,
breath stilled, gaze unturned,
while a sniper’s law cradles
within my curved finger.
But the Ruger is kind,
it will incapacitate,
a Barak would just detach his leg.
I will keep the casings,
even those ‘two for one’ errors
when a bullet carries through.
So, I ask for authorisation –
one more hit.
We’re only talking knees.
Clearly, we shouldn’t
liquidate the kids.
The Winding-sheet
There you are,
wrapped inside the bindings of war,
only the small length of you to guess your age.
And here, your mother waits,
a stillness of grief before the unravelling.
No flag tells us your story,
only the merge of white on red,
as layer after layer after layer
the bandages unpick,
and through an opening
only big enough to place
a mother’s final kiss,
that glimpse of who you were.
So, there you are,
wrapped inside the bindings of war,
now disappeared along a corridor
of television news.
Some things you can’t unsee
in the unwrapping.
Nor ever should.
The Galway Review 