Ger Duffy lives in Co Waterford. Ireland. Her poems are published by PNR, Poetry Ireland Review, Banshee, Southword, Under the Radar, Local Wonders and forthcoming in Propel. She is a Pushcart nominee. In 2024, she won the Desmond O’Grady International Poetry Award and the Redline Poetry Competition. Her pamphlet was shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Award and commended in the Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition. She was awarded an Agility Award by the Arts Council of Ireland. She is curator of Speak Your Truth community writing programme and hosts the poetry reading series The Poetry Lounge in Waterford.

Testimony of Soap

(i.m. of the women and children held in Mother & Baby Homes in Ireland 1922- 1998, whose testimonies have been erased by the state)

“And darkness and worms shall be their dwelling place”
(after Ishion Hutchinson)

ashamed soap birth soap blood soap boarded out soap
buried soap cold soap child allowance soap churched soap
confined soap congenital idiot soap decades of the rosary soap
dehydration soap destitute soap discarded baby soap
dysfunction soap fallen women soap glaxo smith klein soap
human remains soap ironing soap illegitimate soap
inferior sub species soap jaundiced soap keep going soap
lack of consent soap laundry soap lice soap locked up soap
marasmus soap mass grave soap mastitis soap naked soap
order of the bons secours soap panic soap penitent soap
pregnant soap premature soap punishment soap
rape soap remembrance soap scrubbed soap sexual abuse soap
sexual assault soap signed away soap silenced soap
stitched soap sewage soap sin soap skeletal soap
slave soap sold soap trafficked soap unmarked grave soap
unmarried soap unpaid soap vanished soap

Words in the poem are taken from testimonies of the survivors’
of Mother & Baby homes.

Heaney & Me

He takes me to Toner’s bog, I follow him
to where the body was found- bones, partial
skin, kidneys and toenails intact since 500BC.
He points out bog cotton, bog violet, rare orchids,

bog bean, bog myrtle, bog asphodel, a Siberian
crane – it is all so interesting! He hands me a tin can,
we pick fraochan*, fewer than previous years, he sighs.
A bush creaks, he holds my hand as he helps me

over a ditch, I am walking on air. He has found a cache
of bog butter, to have with the scones his aunt has made
for us and a HP bottle of warm tea, corked sloppily
with paper. I think of- a goose’s wing on the floured board,

the sunlit yard, her whitened nails. I have him all to myself
as we sit on a Foxford rug, surrounded by black butter soil,
flat as far as the eye can see, sunlight trains down on us
steady as a gun. His shoulders globe like a full sail

as he stretches his legs, his crumpled suit shiny at the knees,
his hair frothyas hawthorn. I cannot think of what to say,
I ask him why he never tried surrealism.
He smiles, Sure, what could be more surreal than this?

*Fraochan – bilberries.

Baile an Ghoilin /Burnham East

town of the fork/Burnham- a yeoman

Turn right at the fork, seven starlings ogham
a wire, loosestrife /montbretia/ragwort /fuschia
/dog roses – a rat dashes in front of you. Trees
sway with psithurism – so loud you think someone
is banging a bodhran. Through the school window
– a statue of the Virgin, curved rail of a bunkbed.
Across the bay, Dingle, unfathomable in mist.
The black dog you walk lunges at walkers, cowers
at sheep. Go uphill, past fleece-heaped gates,
vacant land with small upright stones – famine
burials. That farmer, who tears up the lane
in his quad turns his back to you. From the barn,
a chorus of whines and yelps, you stop,
more whines and yelps. At the graveyard;
Siobhan Ni Chlerigh, age 25, hunger strike 1926.
Turn back at the yellow sign where the lane ends,
past drooping bushes, where berries hang
like bloody clots festooned with bluebottles.
Watch the scalloped shore of Ventry Bay,
where headless corpses were laid, when corpses
were plentiful here. Cows stare back
from the shelter of a derelict cottage, rain
sweeps across the bay like an old grey shawl.

Hotpants

My tender bud breasts, downy fur under my armpits
and down below metamorphosed daily. Grown men
spoke to my breasts, when I served them in my father’s
shop. My older sister bought me a skinny tight tee-shirt
with lurid yellow hotpants. My ponytail became a low
side tail, I stole my sister’s frosted blue eyeshadow
and pink wet look lipstick. Boys at the tennis club, hid
behind hedges to watch porn magazines, while us girls
sat on benches and waited. We waited until they were ready,
when we all squashed into a viewing box to play the game.
The game involved giving each other marks out of ten
for sex appeal. I usually got a six or seven, my hotpants
elevated me to a nine. One girl was told she had no score
as her face did not compute, the boys thought this hilarious.
She often stayed after we left. After we drank our cokes
she would emerge, red faced, muzzle haired, her eyes
averted. If we wondered what went on, we never
discussed it. Our turn would come.