Helen Bovaird Ryan, originally from County Down, is a former secondary school teacher in Edinburgh and a graduate of Trinity College Dublin, where she earned an M.Phil in Creative Writing in 1999. With over seventeen years of experience, she has taught Creative Writing at a Dublin Further Education College and facilitated workshops for community groups, engaging both adults and young people. Her publications include an essay on children’s literature in Robert Hogan’s Dictionary of Irish Writers, a poem in New Irish Writing (December 2021), and another in the UK online magazine Culture Matters (July 2022). Helen’s talent has been recognized with two poems shortlisted for the prestigious Bridport Poetry Competition in 2023 and 2024.

Now that You’ve Gone

I yearn to find the good things
the plants you grew, Snow in Summer, Snap Dragons, London Pride,
sow them in my garden borders

Learn the songs you played on the piano,
Side-saddle, Intermezzo,
remember your laugh, your rubber face grimaces,

the local phrases that made you chuckle,
like eating too much prog or sleutering in water,
will I buck that out the day, or the morra?

Yet still the bad things intrude.
My first birthday card in years from you,
pink, floral, almost sickly To my Darling Daughter

Inside a crudely torn edge of paper, its jagged teeth
set to saw
my fifty-year old heart in two.

I hear us again, singing together,
the others already gone to school. Me up in your bed,
curtains pulled, ill with measles, too young to read

you downstairs, cleaning.
When we sing, our voices blend
in easy laughing unison, songs with no end

Lavenders blue, dilly, dilly, lavenders green,
when I am king, what will be, will be, there’s a hole in the bucket,
dear Liza, dear Liza, the future’s not ours to see

We sing on and on,
the child in me not understanding
your crying, your sensibilities,
yet longing to cure you, for the rest of your life.

Ditches

Wet heavy heady earth
cut deep, turned,
the smell of rotting loam
like a new-filled grave.
Stones stand sharp, slate edges
exposed. Deep ruts of wheels
nearby slowly sludge and merge.

Under my fingers wild grasses snap
where once in summer, filled with sap
they bent, resisted, twisted swayed,
protecting their seeds. Now decay
reeks along the hedges.

I will bury dead stones
deep, deeper in this earth: stamp on,
jump on bones, squash and squelch
flesh until it cries out for mercy.
Mercy?
I have none.

Follow the River Home

The barley fields are always just mown.
Shorn, short hollow stalks nick bare ankles,
measle them with blood.
Further on you wade through long grass
speckled with cuckoo spit that slimes,

clings to calves.
When feet stumble on sludgy mud,
strong wiry ferns hold fast,
save you from sliding, brachling down
the banks into the brown foam of the burn below.

Now the river enters a tall pine wood.
Dark, sponge-dry underfoot,
ground that rarely feels rain.
A high canopy above filters
a peppering of sunshine.

Out on the meadow beyond,
far away across the river, beside the fairy fort
and the high fences of the deer park
your back-to-front house stands proud on a drumlin,
Grand. Contemporary. Foreign.

Footsteps falter, side track to
follow a fox’s path
through a fallow field
where dry cow pats
speak of cattle been and gone.

Among barren grasses and yellow rattle
fleshy docken leaves sprout
in the shaded lee
of tilting lichened walls
built from ancient stone

All Applications Welcome

Partner; Grade V or above with immediate effect

This vacancy is open to all who meet the following criteria;

Intelligence Certificate (Grade B or above)
5 years relevant experience
Certificate in at least SEVEN of the recognised Humanity courses named below;

Truthfulness
Sense of humour
Empathy
Sense of humour
Kindness
Sense of Humour
Magnanimity
Sense of Humour
Selflessness
Sense of Humour
Friendship
Sense of humour

Please note, all applicants will be subjected to a one-year probationary period
It is anticipated that interviews for the above position will commence forthwith
until the position has been permanently filled
Closing date for the above position; not applicable
Further information, including job description is available on the website
http;/www.lookingforadecentlifepartner.com/vacancies
We are a company which promotes equal opportunities in the workplace
All applications welcome.
Almost.

For The First Time

Narin Strand

My four boys,
ranging twenty-one down to ten
jostle barefoot on damp sand,
laughing, tripping
each other,
take turns to shoot a ball
between a jumper
and trainer.
So many times, their father thundered
down these dunes,
sent them flying. Flapping chickens,
skraighing in terror and delight.

For the first time on this same strand,
they play alone.

I have to get away.

Out of sight,
round the sandy curve
I redden at my urgency.
A hot, sour need
wells up,
burning my insides
like heartburn in heavy pregnancy.
This searing need to be me, to breathe.
Ahead, people, far away on the strand,
spread out, bobbing, running, spilling into the water.
Impressionist blobs, blue, orange, red,
intensified against the wide grey sky,
A dog’s bark whipped away
on wind and tide.

Inishkeel Island
stretches farther, yet more distant than I remember.
For years we walked this strand, honeymoon-hands,
later, arms linked,
talking, planning, laughing, loving the wind-lashing,
ignoring rain slanting in, striding on.

Today my shoes are wrong.
I sink in sand, spurt footfalls
stumble forward
toward the firm wet stretch that etches a beige arc out
around the bay.
Here I walk with ease,
arms swing, lungs strain,
sing out my prowess.

A walker with an ear piece
pounds past. Confident, strident.
The Monet blobs advance,
dogs gambol at the water’s edge,
a child’s cry tears the canvas

I volte-face,
stride past Sean scrawled in curly letters,
Steve marked a few metres on- forever friends.
Who the hell writes their names in sand?
Mine are carved in stone.

Faster, faster, round the bend.
The headland looms.
There was a time
when I loved its stone wall veins,
threading present to the past.
Today I want to sever that thread.

There was a time.
A life time.

My name soughs, light as air, carried aloft.
And there, my sons wave.
Barefoot, they laugh,
playing in a guddle,
threading together,
heddle and threddle.
For the first time.
Two years on.

There is a time.