Terri Metcalfe has been published in journals such as Abridged, Skylight 47, A New Ulster, The Martello Journal and The Storms. She was invited by the late Kevin Higgins as a featured reader for the 20th anniversary of Over The Edge. Recently she was chosen for the 2024 Open Window Mentorship programme, during which she worked with the poet Derek Coyle. Terri placed second in the 2024 ‘Poems for Patience’ competition with her poem, ‘January’.

Cillín

For the children buried at The Rockies, Westport, Co Mayo

this is now your mother
she’ll never imagine a word from your first sound
she is rain settling around you,
wept from birch boughs

this is now your father
he’ll never sing your cries to sleep
he is wind, his lullaby
chilled by wild sea breath

this is now your grandmother
she’ll never pause to smile,
tuck a soft curl behind your velvet ear
she is layers of bracken blanket

this is now your grandfather
he’ll never imagine you growing old
he is yellow mittens of gorse flowers
spiked across your burial ground

these are now your cillín siblings,
because no cross adorned
your foreheads
you remain unmarked.

First published by Black Bough Poetry in ‘Sound & Vision’

January

On this red ladder,
staring a tattered angel in the face,
I reach through dust
and ready-to-drop pine needles.
The off-white window frame,
several layers of gloss paint
like folds of curd,
is older than I am.
Blu-tac, drawing pins and cellotape
might be all that’s holding it together.
The lake, once prairie-flax blue,
is now a grey support for egrets
that hang from alder,
like these Christmas decorations. 
Three swans are martyrs to the lake.
They have been here for four years
and must be close to moving on.
I don’t know if swans move on.
I hope there is enough pondweed
or small fish for them to stay.
A mallard breaks the whiteness –
a flash of blue underside,
the emerald of his head. 
It’s the planning of spring.
Winter becomes a ghost
as I remember bulbs planted
in the soft earth of summer.
Their white and purple and gold.
Their pushing through.
The thought that this all comes back each year.
How it all holds together.

First published by Saolta Arts (placed second in their Poems for Patience competition)

Swans in June

Edges of daylight crawling
in from the east,
intrude, like storm
chasers after hurricanes.

The illuminated lake is swan-full –
three pairs and a grey sway
of fluffy cygnets, curious
to their feathers and circumstances.

No one can explain why
a swan’s neck
is shaped like a half.
Half of a shape.

Leaves are caught in patches
of imperceptible movement.
Or it’s a nest,
a bowl of ribbons.

The sun exhausts the sky,
leaving it breathless
like a boat with no sail.
The spill of light stills.

One swan, wings flat and calm,
meets another –
careful strips of torn paper,
thrown, drifting.

December to June

It’s a morning like any other, 
sat as I am, in a blue room, 
with the blue sky tipping
white mist over the hills.

A vase of corkscrew hazel branches
has gathered months of dust,
and still, in mid-June, holds 
Christmas’s one surviving,

dried, miniature squash.
Pale orange and hooked about the cable
of worn-out fairy lights.

I’m not entirely here though,
I am hanging around late December,
before the sun started to rise

and now plummets.
Paler, smaller, surviving.

Publication forthcoming as part of Kenmare Arts Festival – Poets Meet Painters anthology

Stolen Apples

The orchard was never a place,
more a feeling.
I didn’t know it then, but it was a birth.

The foundations of an appreciation for things
gone, or going.
The longing of nostalgia.

An old dry-stone wall split
our back garden from the grove,
rocks loose where we’d climbed

over for five or six years.
Since the age of continually
bruised knees,

to find the non-blemished apples,
the less tart ones,
the rosy beauties.

We set down our bags in the warm
and speckled light of after school
joy, fallen fruit underfoot like lost jewels.

Someone shook a branch
and a bounty pelted us from the sky,
our mouths upended, open.

This was autumn in a valley
of initiations and endings,
chapters turning like leaves.

I would hike tree trunks forever,
their strength was guidance,
determination to keep going.

Until the bulldozers came in,
stripped a few hundred tip bearers
in minutes. Heirlooms of our youth

razed to the ground.
Fragments of pippins or russets
bathed in concrete.

Then it became a place.
A place we kept quietly on our tongues,
like the taste of stolen apples.