Gerry Mc Donnell was born and lives in Dublin. He was educated at Trinity College where he edited Icarus literary magazine. He has had six collections of poetry published and a novella. He has also written for stage, radio, television and opera. His writing has been translated into Breton, French, Russian and Romanian. In 2022 a collection of haibun, haiku and senryu, called A Kiss was published by Alba Publishing. His latest book called A Life Reclaimed, is a selection of his writing over the last thirty years, published by Alba Publishing  in 2024. He is a member of the Irish Writers Union.

Poète Maudit

By Gerry Mc Donnell

I James Clarence Mangan, spread sheets of white, worded paper, on the white bed sheets, in the cholera sheds of the Meath Hospital. My last words of the life I lived. A straw bed in a hovel. Howling winds in the hallways. Threatened candles close to broken windows. Starving, frozen. The country gripped by famine. The withered, frothing green at the mouth, descending on the city. Visions for company. A jealous Muse of Tragedy, assigned to me. Promise cut short by spendthrift father. Taken from my precious books, a bread-winner at fifteen, long hours in the smoke-filled, coarse atmosphere of a scrivener’s office.  Promise of chandelier-lit drawing rooms. Only watching from the cold streets. Her laughter, holding a delicate flame of fine wine. Turning away. Ease of pain in The Bleeding Horse tavern, frozen bones thawing by the fire, finding another life in drink and drugs, a soft dream of her. Then always the nightmare. Waking to a wailing muse, beckoning me back to the fluttering candle, to shed my life on white pages. The last words. My last breath.

Notè: James Clarence Mangan (1803-1849), Ireland’s poète maudit, admired by James Joyce and W. B. Yeats.