Helen Bovaird Ryan is a graduate of Queen’s University Belfast and holds an M.Phil in Creative Writing from Trinity College Dublin (1999). A former secondary school teacher in Edinburgh, she went on to teach Creative Writing for seventeen years at a Dublin Further Education College, while also facilitating workshops for a wide range of community groups. Her work has been published in New Irish Writing and Culture Matters, and she contributed an essay on children’s literature to the Dictionary of Irish Writers. Two of her poems were shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Competition in 2023 and 2024. In 2025, nine of her poems were published online by The Galway Review.

For The First Time

Narin Strand, Donegal

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

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,
Sidesaddle, 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.

A long Shot

Post war Christmases in a festooned living-room
crepe paper streamers hang in diagonal crinkly lines
fixed to picture rails with concertina paper lanterns and selotape

A blue and red metal scooter,
reading a Sooty album by a tiny fire
in Mum and Dad’s black painted wooden- floor bedroom.
A dolls house, the protype of the house
my dad has designed and built,
the move long overdue from this council house,
a row of twelve sliding down a steep country hillside

Blinding flashes of happiness, most in sepia tones,
Granny and Grampa over from Glasgow,
Dad refilling whisky glasses
Mum vamping boogie and ballads on the piano,
cigarette beating time, side-saddle, from her mouth.

Ma Bonnie lies over the Ocean,
so why don’t you
Show me the way to go home
in Gilly Gilly ossenfeffer
Kastenellen Bogen by the sea

My older sister dancing a reel
corner to corner
in that small square of a living-room
ponytail bouncing
a wriggle of crossed ankles in a hornpipe
me sitting on Dad’s broad knee,
singing along
Will ye no come back again?

Come summer,
the long trek pushing bikes,
hauling trikes up
to the top of the road
free-wheeling down the hill
where few cars drove
save Dad’s big Humber Hawk

Broad red bench front seat,
my perch atop the wide armrest,
between Mum and Dad,
walnut dashboard,
permanently overflowing ashtray

Saturday nights Dad
carted steaming pots of water
next door to the downstairs freezing bathroom,
carried us bathed, hair washed
back to the fire to dress in jammies, zipper dressing gowns,
clipped our toenails while ash dripped
off his cigarette,
Drying hair at the tiled red- hot grate
Bronco Lane, Wells Fargo, Cheyenne,
Dixon of Dock Green
Evenin’ all

Early Sunday mornings
scrolling heavy bed clothes
down to make a horse
at the end of the bed.
Rawhide, The Lone Ranger, Wait for me Mr. Dylan!
Me always the passenger in the stagecoach bed,
never allowed to ride bareback.
Sunday nights at the London Palladium,
sticky sweetie bags in hand

Once Dad made us stilts from washed out soup tins,
bored holes for string.
We clip- clopped up and down our path
til the tins caved in

Making dens in waist high
meadow grasses behind the houses
chasing cows til face-height barbed wire
ripped my left cheek to shreds,
an Easter egg my consolation

A week after I had my first baby
Mum warned me
not to lift the child when it cried.
Why? My surprise was genuine

Ah sure you were such a good baby
Such a good sleeper your father never saw you.
Went to bed at five and didn’t get up to nine the next morning.

What? I asked.
She smirked.
Sure you were fed, bathed and changed
So I put you down in the other room,
closed the door,
came back in to the living room
and turned up the radio.
You need to do the same.
Otherwise
you’ll spoil that child.

111

Look back down that lens.
Who and what do you really see?

A world where more and more
she would withdraw to the periphery
of her orphan disorders

And his flawed thinking always
that if he (and later we)
did everything, everything
then that might, maybe make her better
But with every year that passed
and every birth
There was less and less of her to give

Yet look one last time
down that long lens
I do see a happiness.
A happiness that yes, would decrease
in exponential, tragic leaps
but now I am ready to accept
that young contentedness was real,
cannot be denied.
My heart is full.